Tags: abookapart

I wrote a book about service workers. It’s called Going Offline. It was first published by A Book Apart in 2018. Now it’s available to read for free online.

If you want you can read the book as a PDF, an ePub, or .mobi, but I recommend reading it in your browser.

Needless to say the web book works offline. Once you go to goingoffline.adactio.com you can add it to the homescreen of your mobile device or add it to the dock on your Mac. After that, you won’t need a network connection.

The book is free to read. Properly free. Not the kind of “free” where you have to supply an email address first. Why would I make you go to the trouble of generating a burner email account?

The site has no analytics. No tracking. No third-party scripts of any kind whatsover. By complete coincidence, the site is fast. Funny that.

For the styling of this web book, I tweaked the stylesheet I used for HTML5 For Web Designers. I updated it a little bit to use logical properties, some fluid typography and view transitions.

In the process of converting the book to HTML, I got reaquainted with what I had written almost seven years ago. It was kind of fun to approach it afresh. I think it stands up pretty darn well.

Ethan wrote about his feelings when he put two of his books online, illustrated by that amazing photo that always gives me the feels:

I’ll miss those days, but I’m just glad these books are still here. They’re just different than they used to be. I suppose I am too.

Anyway, if you’re interested in making your website work offline, have a read of Going Offline. Enjoy!

2010 was a good year for me. I moved into a new home. Salter Cane released an album. We had a really good dConstruct. And I wrote a book.

It was HTML5 For Web Designers, the very first title from a new indie publisher called A Book Apart.

Back then, I wrote about the writing process, Jason wrote about the design, Mandy wrote about editing, and Jeffrey wrote a lovely foreword. What a dream team!

From there, A Book Apart went from strength to strength. Under Katel’s stewardship, they released the must-have books for web design and development.

One of the perks of being an author for A Book Apart is that I get a copy of every book published. I have a shelf of slim but colourful book spines.

Now, after 14 years and 60 titles, the collection is complete. A Book Apart won’t be publishing any more new books. Don’t worry—you can still buy the existing titles at all good bookshops, like bookshop.org. They made sure to prepare the way for this decision.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to express how grateful I am to everyone at A Book Apart. They treated me very, very well. Heck, they even let me publish a second book.

Thank you, team—it was a pleasure and honour to collaborate with you.

You Deserve a Tech Union, A Book Apart

Coming soon—Ethan’s next book is exactly what the tech industry needs right now.

Tech workers—designers, engineers, writers, and many others—have learned that when they stand together, they’re poised to build a better version of the tech industry.

Bookin’. — Ethan Marcotte

The twelve(!) year old photo that Ethan has illustrated this post with still makes my heart sing.

Responsible JavaScript, A Book Apart

TAKE MY MONEY!!!

If we want people to fully experience the sites we have worked so hard to craft, then we must be judicious in our use of JavaScript. In thoughtful detail, Jeremy Wagner shows how JavaScript can be used to progressively enhance server-side functionality, while improving speed and access for more visitors. By centering user needs every step of the way—from toolchains to metrics to testing—we can all contribute to a more inclusive, accessible, and resilient web.

Responsible JavaScript

I cannot wait for this book (apart) by Jeremy Wagner to arrive—it’s gonna be sooooo good!

Increasing the amount of JavaScript we ship results in poor user experiences, and the iron law of our work is that users must come first. Our preferences and comfort as developers are secondary.

That’s a mission to take to heart while we figure out how we can use JavaScript more responsibly in an industry that relies on it more than ever — and I think that Responsible JavaScript — a carefully written book that the talented people at A Book Apart have worked with me to publish — can help you along the way.

Demystifying Public Speaking by Lara Callender Hogan

Lara’s superb book on public speaking is now available in its entirity for free as a web book!

And a very beautiful web book it is too! All it needs is a service worker so it works offline.

A Live Interview With Rachel Andrew and Jeremy Keith on Vimeo

I really enjoyed this 20 minute chat with Eric and Rachel all about web standards, browsers, HTML and CSS.

Today marks ten years since the publication of HTML5 For Web Designers, the very first book from A Book Apart.

I’m so proud of that book, and so honoured that I was the first author published by the web’s finest purveyors of brief books. I mean, just look at the calibre of their output since my stumbling start!

Here’s what I wrote ten years ago.

Here’s what Jason wrote ten years ago.

Here’s what Mandy wrote ten years ago.

Here’s what Jeffrey wrote ten years ago.

They started something magnificent. Ten years on, with Katel at the helm, it’s going from strength to strength.

Happy birthday, little book! And happy birthday, A Book Apart! Here’s to another decade!

Resilient Management | A book for new managers in tech

I got a preview copy of this book and, my oh my, it is superb!

If your job involves dealing with humans (or if it might involve dealing with humans in the future), you’ll definitely want to read this.

The Elements of Content Strategy — A Book Apart

Erin’s classic book is now available to read online for free!

A Book Apart, Front-End Next Steps

If you buy this bundle of books, you get Going Offline in some very, very good company.

Going Offline by Jeremy Keith – a post by Marc Thiele

This is such a lovely, lovely review from Marc!

Jeremy’s way of writing certainly helps, as a specialised or technical book on a topic like Service Workers, could certainly be one, that bores you to death with dry written explanations. But Jeremy has a friendly, fresh and entertaining way of writing books. Sometimes I caught myself with a grin on my face…

Over on A List Apart, you can read the first chapter from Tim’s new book, Flexible Typesetting.

I was lucky enough to get an advance preview copy and this book is ticking all my boxes. I mean, I knew I would love all the type nerdery in the book, but there’s a bigger picture too. In chapter two, Tim makes this provacative statement:

Typography is now optional. That means it’s okay for people to opt out.

That’s an uncomfortable truth for designers and developers, but it gets to the heart of what makes the web so great:

Of course typography is valuable. Typography may now be optional, but that doesn’t mean it’s worthless. Typographic choices contribute to a text’s meaning. But on the web, text itself (including its structural markup) matters most, and presentational instructions like typography take a back seat. Text loads first; typography comes later. Readers are free to ignore typographic suggestions, and often prefer to. Services like Instapaper, Pocket, and Safari’s Reader View are popular partly because readers like their text the way they like it.

What Tim describes there isn’t a cause for frustration or despair—it’s a cause for celebration. When we try to treat the web as a fixed medium where we can dictate the terms that people must abide by, we’re doing them (and the web) a disservice. Instead of treating web design as a pre-made contract drawn up by the designer and presented to the user as a fait accompli, it is more materially honest to treat web design as a conversation between designer and user. Both parties should have a say.

Or as Tim so perfectly puts it in Flexible Typesetting:

Readers are typographers, too.

A Book Apart, We’re donating 25% profits to RAICES

What’s happening right now at the US border is heartbreaking and inexcusable. We’re donating 25% of all profits today and tomorrow (June 19 & 20) to RAICES, to help reunite detained immigrant parents and children.

On Rejection | Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design

The focus of the A Book Apart series is what makes it great …and that means having to reject some proposals that don’t fit. Even though I’ve had the honour of being a twice-published A Book Apart author, I also have the honour of receiving a rejection, which Jeffrey mentions here:

In one case we even had to say no to a beautifully written, fully finished book.

That was Resilient Web Design.

So why did we turn down books we knew would sell? Because, again—they weren’t quite right for us.

It was the right decision. And this is the right advice:

If you’ve sent us a proposal that ultimately wasn’t for us, don’t be afraid to try again if you write something new—and most importantly, believe in yourself and keep writing.

Tim Brown: Coming soon: Flexible Typesetting

Fellow web type nerds: Tim Brown brings very good tidings indeed!

My new book is called Flexible Typesetting, and it will be published by A Book Apart this summer. I absolutely cannot wait for you to read it, because we have so much to talk about.

Going Offline with ServiceWorker | text/plain

This is such a nice review of Going Offline from Eric!

As anyone who has received unsolicited (or solicited) feedback from me about their book knows, I’m an extremely picky reader, and I have no significant complaints on this one. Highly recommended.

A Book Apart, Get to Know Jeremy Keith

My publishers asked me some questions. My answers turned out to be more revealing of my inner demons than I was expecting. I hope this isn’t too much oversharing, but I found it quite cathartic.

My greatest fear for the web is that it becomes the domain of an elite priesthood of developers. I firmly believe that, as Tim Berners-Lee put it, “this is for everyone.” And I don’t just mean it’s for everyone to use—I believe it’s for everyone to make as well. That’s why I get very worried by anything that raises the barrier to entry to web design and web development.

It’s ironic that, at the same time as we can do so much more with less when it comes to the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in browsers, many developers are choosing to make things more complicated by introducing complex tool chains, frameworks and processes.

At the end of my new book, Going Offline, I have a little collection of resources relating to service workers. Here’s how I introduce them:

If this book were a podcast, then this would be the point at which I would be imploring you to rate me on iTunes (or I’d be telling you about a really good mattress). Instead, I’d like to give you some hyperlinks so that you can explore some of the topics in this brief book in more detail.

It always feels a little strange to publish a list of hyperlinks in a physical book, so I figured I’d republish them here for easy access…

Explanations

• Mariko Kosaka wrote and illustrated an explanation of service workers in a post on her site called “Service Worker, what are you?” (https://kosamari.com/notes/Service-Worker-what-are-you).
• Mariko also wrote and illustrated an explanation of promises called “The Promise of a Burger Party” (https://kosamari.com/notes/the-promise-of-a-burger-party).
• Ire Aderinokun wrote a clear guide to “The Service Worker Lifecycle” (https://bitsofco.de/the-service-worker-lifecycle/).
• Yoav Weiss has an explanation of different kinds of caching in “A Tale of Four Caches” (https://blog.yoav.ws/tale-of-four-caches/).

Guides

• Lyza Gardner wrote a step-by-step guide for Smashing Magazine on “Making A Service Worker: A Case Study” (https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/02/making-a-service-worker/).
• Jake Archibald has collected a series of service worker strategies into an “offline cookbook” (https://jakearchibald.com/2014/offline-cookbook/).
• Jake also recorded an excellent online video series that you can enjoy for free (https://www.udacity.com/course/offline-web-applications—ud899).

Examples

• Mike Riethmuller has on offline page on his site that shows articles you’ve previously visited (https://madebymike.com.au/writing/service-workers/).
• Ethan Marcotte has a similar offline page, but he also shows metadata for each article (https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/going-offline/).
• Una Kravets allows you to choose which pages on her site you want to save for reading offline (https://una.im/save-offline/).

Progressive web apps

• Alex Russell answers the question “What, Exactly, Makes Something A Progressive Web App?” (https://infrequently.org/2016/09/what-exactly-makes-something-a-progressive-web-app/).
• Ada Rose Cannon goes into the details of “The Building Blocks Of Progressive Web Apps” (https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/09/the-building-blocks-of-progressive-web-apps/).
• Aaron Gustafson quite rightly points out that “Yes, That Web Project Should Be a PWA” (https://alistapart.com/article/yes-that-web-project-should-be-a-pwa).
• Jason Grigsby outlines “The Business Case for Progressive Web Apps” (https://cloudfour.com/thinks/the-business-case-for-progressive-web-apps/).

Tools

• Google released a collection of scripts and tools for going offline called Workbox (https://developers.google.com/web/tools/workbox/).
• To get started with your manifest and service worker, you can paste your website’s URL into PWA Builder (http://preview.pwabuilder.com/).
• Lighthouse is a great testing tool for progressive web apps that’s now bundled into Chrome’s Developer Tools under the Audits panel (https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/).

Documentation

• Over at the website of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) you can dig into the details of the Web App Manifest specification (https://www.w3.org/TR/appmanifest/).
• The ever-evolving service worker specification is on the W3C’s Github account (https://w3c.github.io/ServiceWorker/).