"The JHipster Mini-Book is one of the cheapest books that InfoQ has ever published." I heard these words in early January from Charles Humble, Head of Editorial at InfoQ. I was quite pleased to hear this because he wrote the following to me when I first told him I wanted to write it with Asciidoctor:
I suspect this is going to be the most expensive book we've ever produced!
Writing and editing the book with Asciidoctor was a pleasant experience for me and the editors because it was all text-based and we didn't have to worry about formatting. Publishing was also greatly simplified because 1) we could use code to customize the title pages, chapter breaks, etc. and 2) we were able to output MOBI and EPUB directly. With previous books, InfoQ had to start with a PDF and then render to other formats.
My only remaining issue is trying to adjust margins on inner/outer pages for printing as a paper book.
InfoQ Mini-Book Template
I liked the Asciidoctor process so much, I created an infoq-mini-book
project on GitHub. You can clone this project and start writing a great book in minutes. See
contributing to InfoQ to learn more about writing a mini-book.
JHipster 3.0
I'll be updating the JHipster book over the next couple months to cover JHipster 3.0. I spoke about
JHipster and mentioned the upcoming 3.0 release at this month's Denver
Open Source Users Group meetup. In addition to the items listed below, 3.0 will allow you to update entities that you've already created with the jhipster:entity sub-generator.
My slides from this presentation are available on SlideShare or you can click through them below.
Originally, I was thinking of upgrading 21-Points to the latest release and then documenting how I did it in a changelog section of the book. However, 3.0 has undergone a massive restructuring in the last couple weeks. Now, it seems like it might be easiest to create 21-Points from scratch again and re-write the code and screenshot sections to fit the latest version. As a reader, would you prefer the start-from-scratch or upgrade approach?
JHipster Blog Demo
Last, but certainly not least, I finally found enough time to record a screencast of the blog app demo I've done in
my JHipster talks. You can watch it on YouTube or simply click play below.
The project I used to create this demo is available on GitHub.