I had plans to do things today. These had to change a bit when the last three chapters of the book arrived ready for their final editing pass. The good news is that the book is now looking super good. The bad news is that I think I know what I’ll be doing for the next day or so….
I’ve made a tiny video about the videos I’ve made about Begin to Code: Building Apps and Games for the Cloud. This one gives you a look at the kind of things that we do.
This is the first page of chapter 1 of Begin to Code Cloud. I know this because I’m presently making the final author pass through the text before it goes off for printing. Rather excited.
Today I recorded 8 demo videos and every one of them failed in some way. By half way through I had a “I wonder what is going to go wrong this time” running gag going in each recording. The good news is that I’ve now finished all the videos for the book. All 67 are complete and uploaded. Now we have to make sure that the QR codes and the links in the book text all line up.
My latest book is now a thing. You can even pre-order it on Amazon.
I’ve been editing the chapters of the new book. Today I sent Chapter 9 through with my edits in place. Folks were pleased, but confused. I hadn’t sent them Chapter 8. Turns out that there is a difference between thinking about doing something and actually doing it. I thought I’d sent it through but it seems I only thought about sending it.
Anyhoo, the chapter has now been sent and I’ve only got three more to edit before the book is completely complete.
When I said it might be a fun idea to record video walkthroughs for all the “Make Something Happen” exercises in the new book I really should have considered what this involves. I’m now up to 40 videos and counting. They’ve been fun to make though. You can find them here.
Writing the glossary for the Begin to Code Cloud book. Spent quite a few minutes trying to decide whether or not to include a definition for the word Glossary.
I’ve been recording videos for the practical examples for “Begin to Code: Building Applications and Games with the Cloud”. The text contains “Make Something Happen” exercises and I thought it might be fun to make a video walkthrough of each. Way to increase your workload Rob.
Anyhoo, I’m up to number 28 which is about half way through the book. The video is walking through the process of taking a working node.js application and deploying it into the cloud. I’d just about finished recording it yesterday when the home phone rang. As I was reaching for the handset I brushed the music player and so if you watch through the screencast you can hear me grappling with the phone and get a very small snippet of music (big prizes if you can work out the track). I’ve a strict policy of doing everything in one take. After all, I never got to redo any of my lectures (although I often wanted to). I find that this makes them properly live.
Sometimes things go wrong (like they used to in lectures) and I leave those bits in too - the process of finding the problem and fixing it is often the most instructive part of the session. In number 28 I had a bit of this when my deployed application failed, but I was able to show how to debug it, find and fix the problem and then redeploy the application. I’m really enjoying making these. You can find the complete playlist here. You can find the book website with a draft copy of the text here.
I’m currently doing the author review pass for the Begin to Code Cloud book. This is the part where I incorporate the comments from the editor and reviewer to produce what should be the final version of the text. As part of it I’ve decided to record a video for each of the “Make Something Happen” elements in the text. These are the practical exercises that help you understand the content. The book contains complete walkthroughs in the text, but I thought it might be useful to also provide video walkthroughs too. How hard can it be? Actually, it’s turning out to be quite fun.
I’m using the wonderful Camtasia program which provides fantastic screen and video capture along with a very powerful editor. It can also publish videos straight to YouTube. I’ve made a template and now it is just a case of running through the exercise, adding the start and end sequences and then sending out the video. The book will contain links and also QR codes that the reader can use to find the videos directly from the page.
I’ve created a playlist for all the content. It is all directly in the context of the book. You can find a book draft here. I’m doing the videos in one take, it is rather like giving a live lecture as I talk about and demonstrate the code. It is adding a bit more time to the editing process, but I think it is well worth it.
I’m writing the final chapter of the book at the moment. I’m calling it “JavaScript technologies”. The idea is to leave the reader with some ideas of things that they can do with JavaScript that they might not expect. For example, how about a website that you can visit to turn a light on and off?
This has turned out to be a wonderful example of how simple it is to deploy complex technology today. You can start with an empty Raspberry Pi and a memory card and within a few minutes you an have a device that you can attach to your home network and access remotely. You can make the device host a web server, wire up a few pins (see above) and have a site you can access with the browser in your phone to make the light work. Completely amazing.
I wrote 24 pages of the book today. This is an impressive number, and almost entirely misleading. What it means is that I spent the day taking the exercises I’ve developed over the last four days and creating screenshots and the narrative that goes with them. It was fun though.
I’m not sure how it happened. I left the computer logged in to GitHub and when I came back Chapter 10 had added itself to the draft document, updated the exercises and put itself on the net. I think this is down to the quality of the content.
You can find Chapter 10, with its friends, here
When I was a lecturer one of the questions I was asked quite often was “What turns a developer into a ‘professional’ developer?”. I’ve just written a chapter in the new book that tries to answer this. Great fun.
I’m presently measuring my life in chapters. I’ve just sent chapter 8 off. On to chapter 9.
I’ve just updated the draft version of Begin to Code with the Cloud. You can find it here along with all the code examples. Please remember that this is a work in progress. Things have moved around and changed names in the ongoing draft, but there should be enough content to give you an idea of where I’m going with this. I’m especially pleased with Chapter 5.
One of the example applications for the book is a game I invented that I had called “Mine Finder”. I’ve just decided that this a silly name. Mines aren’t the kind of thing you really want to find. So, it is now called “Cheese Finder”. Much nicer. And it has multiple cheeses too…
I’ve just finished writing Chapter 4 of Begin to code: Building apps and games in the cloud. You can find the new chapter, along with all the example programs including your very own web server, here.
I showed number one son Mine Finder. “Too easy” he said. “How about adding multiple mines?”.
Done. Three mines in the game. You can play it here. The one above was quite fiendish…
We’ve played a bit of “Mine Finder” now, and it turns out to be a bit too easy. Once you know the colours you can narrow down the mine position quite easily. So, today I present “tricky mine finder”. When the game starts you don’t know which colour represents which distance. In the screenshot above the squares one space from the mine are light blue. It took me 14 tries to get it. If you want to have a go yourself you can find the game here.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
Make your own programming language. Find out more here.
