You can now preview the entirety of Up and Running with Node.js by Tom Hughes-Croucher. O’Reilly Media is making the book available as part of its Open Feedback Publishing System (OFPS) while Hughes-Croucher finishes the book. “I’m going to be updating it every two weeks with the first update slated for next week,” he says. Readers are encouraged to leave comments and feedback. The book is a general introduction to Node.js, from installation to building applications.
Hughes-Croucher is chief evangelist at Node.js sponsor company Joyent. Before that he was a technical evangelist at Yahoo. Prior to this release, he published a free PDF of the first 20 pages of the book.
From the Author’s Note:
When Simon, my editor, and I were initially discussing this project it was obvious how vibrant the Node.js community is. We felt that it was important that we engaged with the community as we worked on this manuscript. In order to do that we decided to release the book in parts as I wrote it. What you are reading now is one of those partial releases.
What you’ll find within this first release is not necessarily the final work that we will publish. We hope by making this book available as it’s written we’ll get your feedback, ideas and thoughts on what I’ve already written and what else we should be covering. Not only that, but Node is growing almost faster than I can keep up with it. Not to mention the community modules which are growing even faster than that. Before we go to press we’ll make sure that the information in the text is up to date with the latest version of Node, and that we haven’t missed any critical contributions from the community that need to be covered.
According to the OFPS help page:
The Open Feedback Publishing System (OFPS) is an O’Reilly experiment that tries to bridge the gap between private manuscripts and public blogs. Following on the let-them-comment-on-everything model established by the Django Book, Real World Haskell, and Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (among others), OFPS allows readers to read in-progress O’Reilly manuscripts, communicate suggestions with the authors, follow others’ comments, and directly participate in the development of new books.
Mastering Node.js is another free book on the subject. It’s available on Github in PDF, ePub, Mobi and HTML formats.
