Revolution Book

[Alan Golub]

Last fall I unleashed a few posts regarding plans for a Revolution Book. I
received several responses, suggestions, inquiries, etc., enough to make me
believe the project is worthwhile.

Unfortunately, things got put on hold due to personal and professional
issues that are only now beginning to settle down. In the coming months, I
plan to devote a substantial amount of my free time (which, after all, isn't
nearly enough time!) to re-launching the project.

Sort of.

What I mean is that I don't quite feel up to the task of writing a complete
book about Revolution, at least not one that would serve the community, or
be worth reading. This is especially true in light of the dramatic
changes/additions evident in version 2, which I have only just incorporated
into my daily work.

I do, however, feel well-equipped to cover what I'll refer to as "basics
plus" in a way that will be helpful to new programmers, and perhaps
experienced programmers looking at Revolution for the first time. To that
end, my plan is to launch a new web site along the lines of Marc Zeedar's
REALbasic Univeristy over at the Applelinks web site
(http://www.applelinks.com/rbu). If you haven't seen it yet, you should take
a look. Marc did a wonderful job developing a series of free tutorials to
introduce newbies to RB. That project, and the success of his shareware
application, Z-Write, made it possible for Marc to launch the very
successful REALbasic Developer Magazine (again, if you haven't seen it yet,
you should take a look -- it's great stuff: http://www.rbdeveloper.com).

I'd like to do for Revolution what Marc and others have done for RB. For
starters, I'm currently architecting/designing the site and planning the
content for the first 2-3 months of articles, with new content at least once
a week. Like RBU, I plan to include tutorials about using Rev, but I'd also
like to adopt a more flexible newsmagazine format, which would allow for
interviews with members of the community, a letters section,
profiles/reviews of apps built with Rev, and general commentary on software
development, marketing, and sales. I envision a full online newsmagazine
dedicated to Revolution, one that may well serve as the basis or inspiration
for a proper Revolution book down the road (whether written by me or by
someone else).

Right now I'm testing on a local server. I expect the site to be up and
running some time around July 4th.

In the meantime, I'd like to hear from anyone who cares to comment. What do
you think? What would you like to see? Are there any questions, success
stories, rants, jokes, ideas you'd like to offer for inclusion on the site?
Any volunteers for interviews/articles/profiles?

If you'd like to reach me about this project, please do so off-list. You can
reach me at asg618 at mac.com. Unless Heather or the list members object, I
would, however, like to use the lists to update everyone on the status of
the project, especially as we get closer to launch.

Until then, I hope everyone enjoys their exploration of all the cool new
stuff in v. 2 (I mean, 2.0r2;)!

Alan S. Golub
StoryCard Software, LLC