Book Update

Very quick post here: the third beta of my AppEngine book "Code in the Cloud" was released this morning. If you've bought a copy of the beta, you can go to your pragmatic account, and download a fresh copy with all of the fixes and new material.

If you haven't bought a copy... Well, if you're interested in cloud programming, I'd like to think that this book is a pretty good overview of the subject. It's about Google AppEngine, but I've done my best to write it so that it discusses the nature of cloud programming in general, using AppEngine as a specific example of a cloud platform. Buying a copy supports your friendly math blogger and makes me happy; and when I'm happy, I'm more likely to write more posts for the blog :-).

The main reason that I'm mentioning it is that a few people have asked me to provide a forum on the blog for questions. I'm happy to answer questions, and I'd love to hear feedback from anyone who's read it - both positive and negative. (And, to be honest, the negative feedback is generally more useful, so I'm very serious when I say that constructive negative feedback is welcome. Anything that you can tell me now, before it's printed, is something that I can fix!)

So if you've got any questions or comments about the book, please go ahead and put them in the comments here. On the other hand, if you find any errors, you're welcome to put them here, but it would help me more if you could file an erratum at the book's pragmatic press page, linked above.

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Hi,

Have you considered mentioning Groovy on Grails on the AppEngine? I find Grails an enormous productivity boost (and enjoyment boost) compared to plain old java.

Best
Anders

@1:

Not in any depth, no.

There's an awful lot of material that I need to cover, and I didn't want the book to turn into a 500 page monstrosity. There are a bunch of books already out on Grails; the main difference between Grails in general and Grails on AppEngine is the AppEngine datastore. The book will go into great depth on datastore, and that information should work for Grails just like it does for plain old Java.