I'm a Semi-Published Author! (Closure: The Definitive Guide)

Today, I am officially a semi-published author in that the half of the book I am working on is available (for pay) online as part of O'Reilly's Rough Cuts program! The title is Closure: The Definitive Guide, and as you may have guessed, the aim is to create an (invaluable!) manual for the Closure Tools suite. When I am finished, the book will cover the Library, Templates, the Compiler, the Testing Framework, and the Inspector, though the six chapters that are available today are only on the Library. However, if you purchase the book through Rough Cuts, you will get the updates to the book as I publish them there, so it is more like buying a subscription than a book.

I am extremely excited about the Rough Cuts program because it allows me to get information out to you, the web developer, much faster than I could if I forced you to wait for the print version. It also gives you the opportunity to provide me with feedback to help ensure that the Guide contains the information that you need.

For those of you who have purchased a book via Rough Cuts before, you may be surprised to see how "rough" my book is compared to the other offerings. This is a fairly new program at O'Reilly, so the first books to go through Rough Cuts were not made available until a nearly complete draft of the book was done. By comparison, my book is half done and has gone through neither copy edit nor technical review. So when providing feedback, please bear in mind the staff at O'Reilly will ultimately help with things like the misuse of parallel structure, but I need your help in determining when something merits a code sample or more explanation.

The material that is currently available is:

• Preface
  
• Chapter 1: Introduction to Closure
  
• Chapter 2: Annotations for Closure JavaScript
  
• Chapter 3: Closure Primitives
  
• Chapter 4: Common Utilities
  
• Chapter 5: Classes and Inheritance
  
• Chapter 6: Event Management
  
• Appendix A: Inheritance Patterns in JavaScript
  
• Appendix B: Frequently Misunderstood JavaScript Concepts
  

Although there is nothing that requires me to write the chapters in order, I was encouraged to start out that way in order to have something that would be well-connected for Rough Cuts readers. This meant that I had to draft the introduction earlier than I would have liked, but I am actually quite happy with what is there right now. Among other things, it contains a complete "Hello World" example that shows how to use all of the tools together, which is something I have yet to see on any blogs or even as part of Google's own documentation.

Currently, I am taking a break from writing more on the Library and am skipping a few chapters ahead to start focusing on the Compiler. As an active member of the Closure Google Groups, it is pretty clear to me that developers need more help in that area, so I hope to make that information available soon.

I also hope to improve Closure in the process of writing this book. When I run into things that I feel are hard to explain, sometimes I end up filing bugs or feature requests against Closure with proposed changes. It is so much easier to write a few paragraphs to report a bug than it is to draft several pages to explain away a quirk!

With 150 pages of content, I suspect I have given you enough to chew on while I put together more information on the Compiler. Please take a look and let me know what you think.

Update: Changed the book link from http://techbus.safaribooksonline.com/9781449381882 to http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9781449381882 where it is actually possible to purchase the book! There is a button that says "Purchase Options" on the upper-right.

google.com uses AJAX to update search results in place?

My Gmail account appears to be in an experiment where searches from google.com update in place. That is, a search for bolinfest takes me to:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=bolinfest&aq=f&aqi=g10&oq=&fp=cbc2f75bf9d43a8f

Rather than the classic:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=bolinfest&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g-p1g2

Apparently this was first reported in January 2009. There was immediately an outcry because the fragment (with includes the keywords used in the Google search) was not included in the referrer, so sites who analyze their traffic using that information were at a loss.

In my version of the experiment, this is no longer an issue because the search results use a URL redirector (which I do not believe is a new practice). Although the first search result is for www.bolinfest.com/, and when I hover over the link in Firefox, the status bar says http://www.bolinfest.com/, the actual destination of the link is:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CAoQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bolinfest.com%2F&rct=j&q=bolinfest&ei=kYU_S8nZAdC0lAeJ0fmVBw&usg=AFQjCNEgHH2q8kppSggtQt45aSSazDTynA&sig2=G54nS0q_UtfEChH7icC_NA

When I follow the link and run javascript:alert(document.referrer) in the address bar, I see the same thing:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CAoQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bolinfest.com%2F&rct=j&q=bolinfest&ei=kYU_S8nZAdC0lAeJ0fmVBw&usg=AFQjCNEgHH2q8kppSggtQt45aSSazDTynA&sig2=G54nS0q_UtfEChH7icC_NA

Note that this URL contains the query in the URL parameter q=bolinfest, which should appease those who are concerned with keyword tracking.

What is interesting is that the AJAX request to load the search results appears to be an ordinary GET request to:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=bolinfest&aq=&aqi=g2&oq=bolinfest&fp=cbc2f75bf9d43a8f

The content of that URL is an HTML page with 21 <script> tags in the <head> and an empty <body> tag.

Also, copying and pasting http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=bolinfest&aq=f&aqi=g10&oq=&fp=cbc2f75bf9d43a8f into the address bar of a new tab works as expected (though I do get a JavaScript error when I paste the URL into a new tab that I do not get when doing the initial search from google.com).

It's hard to say what this really means, if anything. Presumably, Google's objective is to make search results load faster without pissing off advertisers. As I'm not in the SEO racket, I'm not terribly interested in the latter, but I am curious whether Google is on to a new technique for loading web content faster!