Poll on the title for an O'Reilly JavaScript book. | Hacker News Reader

Poll on the title for an O'Reilly JavaScript book.

21 pointsmaccman13 comments

I'm writing a book for O'Reilly on building JavaScript Web Applications.

To give some indication of the contents, the chapter titles are:

Introduction 1 - MVC & Classes 2 - Events & Observing 3 - Models & Data 4 - Controllers & State 5 - Views & Templating 6 - Dependency management 7 - Working with Files 8 - The Realtime Web 9 - Testing & Debugging 10 - Deploying 11 - Libraries - Spine 12 - Libraries - Backbone 13 - Libraries - JavascriptMVC 14 - Appendix - jQuery primer 15 - Appendix - CSS Extensions 16 - Appendix - CSS3 Reference

The question is... what should the title be? Vote for your favorite, or include alternative suggestions.

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How about "Modern JavaScript Applications"? Couldn't an app built with this methodology be wrapped into an iOS/Android application?

Edit: I almost want to just up-vote addyosmani's entry. :)

JavaScript for the Modern Web?

Modern JavaScript Application Architecture Building Stateful JavaScript Apps JavaScript Web Apps Demystified

... in 24 Hours for Head First Dummies.

You picked the best title in the first sentence of your survey ;)

I think something plain and to-the-point like 'JavaScript Web Applications' suits an O'Reilly publication, and gives a title a little bit more authority / respect.

If you'd like to spice it up a little in the spirit of a Pragmatic Programmers / 37 Signals publication you might add something like 'Crafting' to the start of it:

'Crafting JavaScript Web Applications'

Obviously that depends on the tone and spirit of your own work, but having seen your efforts over the years I'd imagine the whole passionate craftsman approach might work.

However the chapters seem to lead up to 'The Realtime Web', and perhaps that's a catchphrase worth leveraging?

'Realtime JavaScript Web Applications'

Perhaps the title's slightly long, but the book would be a lot more Googleable with the addition of 'realtime' judging by Google search results, but SEO's probably less of a worry, more a minor observation.

Perhaps you could break it into title / subtitle?

'JavaScript Web Applications - Building for the Realtime Web'

That's probably enough suggestions - your tweet just caught me in the morning with a good cup of tea :)

Definitely "Javascript Web Applications" out of those options. Apps is misleading and informal. "Javascript Applications" is ambiguous, and the only people who will understand "Stateful" probably already know what's in the book. "Modern Javascript" is also good because that's basically what you're talking about here. If you focused on the realtime aspect of web app dev, you could even go with something like "Realtime Javascript Applications" - I bet there are a LOT of people searching and looking for books on that subject (I know I was).

This is HN. Instead of voting, you should find some way to A/B test the options.

That said, all the options are plain and descriptive, so I'm not sure how much difference it will make. Then again, who knows? Maybe people will buy it just because they're searching for "web app" or "stateful" or something.

If that's the case, maybe you can see if there are any relevant Google keyword trends to take advantage of.

Relevant: http://python.mirocommunity.org/video/1186/djangocon-2009-dj...

(Avi's pioneering talk about the trend of moving logic to the client.)

I might go with "Structured Javascript Applications", or something similar, as your chapter titles indicate a degree of concern for structure/robustness/non-spaghetti-code apps.

Or maybe I'm just seeing what I want to see.

'Javascript for Web Apps' would be my title

Stateful JavaScript Web Applications.

but far more important... which animal will it have? no one cares if it was titled "perl" or "scripting in perl" or "perl. definitive guide"...

Ah, that's going to be the next poll :) To be honest though, I don't have much control over what the animal will be. That's one of the artists at O'Reilly's choice: http://oreilly.com/news/lejeune_0400.html

>Stateful JavaScript Web Applications.

Agreed. It's the only one that properly describes the subject.

Also agreed that if it's any good people will just refer to it using the animal anyway.

EDIT: "Modern" would also be a good choice.

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