Hello all, I am not sure if it is appropriate to talk of this on the mailing list or not. If not please let me know and I will stop immediately and apologize for this post. I assume for now it is acceptable (because I saw similar discussions on other mailing lists on the Apache Group), so I post this.
As some community members already know, I wrote some chapters (6) of a book on OpenWhisk (so you know what you did when I disappeared for a few months :)), then I was close to release it as open source and I asked what to do of them on the Slack channel. In a sense the book was complete and ready to release. To my surprise, instead of recommending to release the book as Open Source I was told instead that publishing it with a prestigious editor would have been better. So I dared to propose the book to the (IMHO) most prestigious technical publisher I know, O'Reilly, and guess what, the book was approved! The chapters I wrote so far focus on Javascript. However, I was recommended (by Carlos and Rodric) not to talk only of Javascript. There is a lot of stuff on Javascript people are looking for learning about other languages. So I ended up with a plan to cover also Python and Go. This is the planned TOC so far. I am asking for opinions on it: TItle: Learning OpenWhisk Part1: Introducing Serverless Development in JavaScript - Serverless and OpenWhisk Architecture - A Simple Serverless Application in JavaScript - OpenWhisk CLI and JavaScript API - Common Patterns in OpenWhisk - Integration Patterns in OpenWhis - Testing OpenWhisk Applications Part 2: Advanced Serverless Development in Python and GoLang - Using Python in OpenWhisk - Using Databases in OpenWhisk - Creating an Alexa Skill in Python - Using GoLang in OpenWhisk - Using Message Queues in OpenWhisk - Creating a Slackbot in GoLang Appendixes - Deployment with wskdeploy - Installing OpenWhisk in Kubernetes The key concern is if a similar TOC is acceptable and making the best compromise, or the book could be too wide (and hard to read) for the potential audience. In my opinion, it should be a good compromise between completeness without requiring too many skills. But here I am open to hearing other opinions. For example, I thought to stick only to javascript but then I would lose more advanced aspects that can be of interests to many developers. Note I can share freely drafts or chapters of the book with members of the community is interested. Contact me privately. But keep in mind the publisher give me only 10 free copies so I cannot promise too many printed free copies :) :) :) PS: the Animal! You know each O'Reilly book has an animal in the cover. After a lot of thinking, I proposed an animal not yet used but I think it fits a lot OpenWhisk: the Pagurus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagurus). Do you like the idea? -- Michele Sciabarra mich...@sciabarra.com
