PG2

The Challenges in Writing a PhoneGap Book
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• Expressions or phrases in languages other than English
• Obscure references to pop-culture topics (although there is an obscure
reference to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and one
blatant reference to Monty Python)
• Pictures of my cats (I have no cats, but a picture of one of my dogs did make
it into the book)
As you look through the example code provided herein, it’s important to keep in
mind that the code was deliberately written to clearly illustrate a particular
PhoneGap-related topic or concept. While there are many things a developer can do
to write compact and/or efficient code, it’s distracting to readers when they have to
analyze every line in order to be able to tell what’s really going on therein. In this
book, the code is expanded to make it as readable as possible. There are, for example,
very few instances where JavaScript anonymous functions are used in the sample
applications. Although using them would have made the code samples smaller,
I deliberately eliminated them (in all but one chapter) for readability purposes.
No effort whatsoever has been made to optimize these examples for speed or compactness.
They’ve been created to teach you the nuances of the PhoneGap APIs,
not best practices for web development.
The Challenges in Writing a PhoneGap Book
Writing a book about PhoneGap (and many other mobile technologies) is hard.
The writing isn’t hard, but keeping up with the changes that occur as you write is
hard. For this book, a lot of important and interesting things happened during the
writing process, and I found myself regularly rewriting chapters to accommodate
recent changes. The good news is that most of the PhoneGap-specific content in
here will remain valid for a very long time. It was industry changes and developer
tool changes that gave me the most trouble.
Let me give you some examples:
• Six (or more) versions of PhoneGap: When I started the book, version
1.0 of PhoneGap had just been released. It seemed that I’d picked the
perfect time to start work on a PhoneGap book. It took me just about
four-and-a-half months to write the manuscript, and during that time three
additional versions of PhoneGap (1.1, 1.2, and 1.3) were released. During
editing and all of the post-production work that needed to be done on the
manuscript, versions 1.4 and 1.5 were released. I expect that by the time
this book makes it onto paper, yet another version of PhoneGap, version
1.6, will have been released.