Into JavaScript? Have I got good news for you!



If you’re interested in JavaScript-driven web apps, snazzy visual fx, and generally confusing people into thinking your site is Flash—but oh-so-much better—you should buy our JavaScript Performance Rocks! book while it’s still in beta. Written by Thomas Fuchs, the creator of Scriptaculous, and yours truly, the maker of funny jokes and shiny graphics.



We cover everything from The Most Ridiculous Performance Fix Ever (and it is ridiculous), to serving strategies, DOM diets, loop unrolling (for those really extreme cases), how to play nice with the garbage collector, and everything in between. And it comes with our custom profiling tool, The DOM Monster, which analyzes your pages and suggests fixes. This package is only $24 right now but will be $29 as soon as it’s done, in mid-June 2009… but if you snag your copy today, you get the final version by email just as soon as it’s ready and save a noteworthy 5 bux! You can’t lose.

During my talk at Canada on Rails I mentioned that I was working on a Scriptaculous cheat sheet, at the behest of none other than Thomas Fuchs himself. (Actually it was more a teasing-slash-friendly challenge situation than a behest, as such, but I digress.) He hasn’t stopped bugging me about it, and so it’s actually gotten done.

It was a real challenge to fit it all in on one page… and I was initially planning to cover more than just the combination effects, but as you can see there wasn’t a stitch of room left over. I didn’t even get to do anything fun with angled text or images!

I hope you like it, nevertheless.

Download

Get it while the bits are hot!

Field Guide to Scriptaculous Combination Effects (PDF, 80K)

Please digg this page if you like the cheat sheet. Spread the word, & all that good stuff.

Workshop for Good Update

And now, for an update on Workshop for Good: We’ve sold out and have a few names on the waiting list. Thanks to everyone! I’m looking forward to the experience.

Even if you can’t come, you might still be able to help us out. If you know anyone or any company who would be interested in supplying prizes or give-aways, or sponsor lunch, Ezra Zygmuntowicz’s travel, or other nice things to help us reach the goal number of $10,000 in proceeds—please don’t hesitate to let me know. (Our current gross is about $9,600 due to student discounts, minus the flight and hotel for Ezra, and a bit for lunch. Jeff would love to reach that goal of $10k.)