My Authoring Experience of Practical Oracle JET with Apress
By: Daniel Curtis
Tags: Programming, Books, Oracle, Enterprise Technology, JavaScript

Just over a year ago I’d just finished breakfast in Brooklyn Diner, New York, when my editor called me to offer me a book contract. I had been in talks with Apress on writing a book about Oracle JET, and at that point I committed the next 8 months of my life to writing. This is partly why it has been so long since I have published a post on here, I’ve not really had the spare time to be able to put any blog posts together.

I often get asked how I got into writing it in the first place, what was the process like and if I would write another. So I thought i’d write up a little bit about my experience.

In the early stages I was contacted by an Editor at Apress (Jonathan Gennick) asking if I would be interested in the idea of writing a book about Oracle JET. I thought about it for a while and I was hesitant to go through with it at first, partly due to confidence, party due to the commitment. In the end, I decided to give it a go with the impression that it can’t be any more difficult than writing a University Dissertation, surely?

I went away and had a chat with one of the Directors at work who had already written a book (see: Design Principles — Process driven Architectures Using Oracle BPM and SOA Suite 12c) to find out a bit more about the experience of writing and how much time I would need to be committing. He warned me about the amount of time it would take, and quite naively I dismissed it and thought it wouldn’t that bad.

It did end up taking a lot of my free time (both physical time spent writing and mental time when not writing), certainly more than I initially expected. I think that is one of the key takeaways I would pass onto any new authors — don’t underestimate the time it takes. Would I have still done it knowing how many of my evenings and weekends I would lose? Probably, yes, but keeping on top of all my deliverables to the publisher and setting my own deadlines is what kept me going throughout.

Practical Oracle JET walks through the process of developing a functional application using Oracle JET. By the end of the book you will have built a support ticket system using a variety of different components bundled with the toolkit, including lists, inputs, and visualizations. The skills acquired from reading the book and working the examples equip you to build your own applications and take your understanding even further to more advanced topics. It is available now and you can find out more information at www.practicaloraclejet.co.uk

Quite early on in the process I decided that I would be building the application at the same time I would be writing the book. The reason I decided to do this was because I wanted the reader to feel like they were on a project building up a real application. Giving that real project feel to the book would not only be better at keeping the reader interested but it would also get the reader used to real project issues, such as rework during the build. I wanted to show how easy it is to make functions and components reusable in the application, so when a reader comes across a potentially reusable scenario on a real project, they should feel comfortable in doing so, rather than duplicating the code.

This way of writing caused me a lot of problems. Despite my best efforts to plan out as much as possible, I had to go back and rework older chapters to accommodate for changes later in the book. There were a few occasions when I found a bug later in the process that required me to go back and rework some of the already drafted and reviewed chapters. Despite these headaches, I would say that it was worth taking the approach I did.

The timing of the project was also unfortunate as JET 6 was released when I was about 70% through writing, and considering JET 6 was a fairly significant upgrade, I took the decision to make sure it was included. This again required rework which ended up delaying the final draft submission. With any technology book the rate of change is going to cause versioning issues, JavaScript is no exception to this (perhaps worse). Apress were very accommodating, I had pre warned them that the JET 6 release may delay the book, and they had no issues with that.

Its been over 5 months since I submitted the final chapters of the book, so I have had some time to think it over. I’m glad that I did it, I learnt an incredible amount and it forced me to understand the technology to a point I may not have done otherwise. I would recommend it to anyone thinking of writing for the first time, as long as you are passionate about the subject, and are likely to be just as passionate about it in a years time when the book is likely to be finished and on shelves.

As for a second book. Right now the short answer is no. I have some ideas, but I think I need a break from writing while I explore other interests, and have some time to reflect and gain some more feedback on this book. With 6 monthly releases to Oracle JET, there will be more to explore and possibly amendments to the existing book to consider. As the code is available on the publishers GitHub, I will post any amendments there.

If you would like to get in touch and ask any questions about the book, please tweet or message me on Twitter: @danneh150

Order now from:

Amazon (UK) — https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1484243455/

Amazon (US) — https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Oracle-JET-Developing-Applications/dp/1484243455

Apress (UK) — https://www.apress.com/gb/book/9781484243459

Apress (US) — https://www.apress.com/us/book/9781484243459