Or how I decided to give Leanpub a whirl and publish a book.

I am not a prolific writer or even a good writer, but I have always enjoyed writing. I have often entertained the idea of writing a book. but was put off by the slow nature of publishing, the long road to getting your content out in front of people.

I like sharing what I find and learn, and the result was this blog. A little like writing a book, without the barriers to entry and I can get my thoughts and writings out quickly.

I work in technology, love what I do and am reasonably good at what I do. I am a big proponent of Agile, I like the visibility you get from the process, the iterative approach, the fail fast nature and continuously improving your project.

Last year I read a book published by a an ex-colleague of mine, Patrick Kua. He used a Leanpub to do so and this gave me an idea.

Leanpub’s motto is “Publish Early, Publish Often”, very agile, very lean. The barrier to publishing has been lowered. Everything is coming together, so today I am happy to announce that I am writing a book.

I am going to base the book on the series of blog posts I wrote a last year on Backbone.js and Jasmine. The content for those posts is available over at Github and I intend to keep the content of this book freely available over there as well, but for those folks who find/found the content useful, I figured maybe they would also like a book version (and yes maybe make a few quid out of it). If you are interested, then why not head over the books page and sign up to get notified when it will be available.

The book aims to take you through creating a basic app, introducing you to Backbone.js and using TDD as the guiding principle. Here’s a rough list of the chapters:

• Setup
• Building a search interface
• Populating a result page
• Testing routes
• Tying it all together
• Migrating your code to Require.js
• Writing functional tests

I am looking for feedback on the topic, so feel free to raise any issues over there. If you have any suggestions for other areas to be covered please let me know.