Thanks for the book. I just found the Github book and was coming back here to link there as well.
The Github link has a much more straightfoward download link. If anyone with mod powers stops by, please edit the URL for this post to point there instead of Issuu.
The killer feature of http://eloquentjavascript.net/ is the console, where you can run and modify the examples, and do the exercises. Do you plan an interactive HTML version?
Several of the examples in "smooth" are quite different from "eloquent" and use a http or websocket server, so they require the node.js runtime environment and can not run only in a browser.
The setup I use is to have the text next to me on a tablet and a text editor that can run CoffeeScript directly on my laptop.
It also takes know-how and time to produce different versions in EPUB and HTML. I tried some free conversion tools but the results were poor.
I would like to fix issues and add material, there is an issue tracker on the project page, where errata and suggestions are welcome.
A few suggestions if you really want to support other formats:
+ Pandoc[1] - a Haskell program/library to translate markups from one format to another (supports LaTeX, which I think you're using).
+ Leanpub[2] - a service that lets you write a book as Markdown or HTML and then easily publish and sell it in multiple formats (PDF, EPUB, Mobi). They do all the conversion for the output formats for you. I don't think they currently support LaTeX, but I have a recollection that they're working on it.
Having said that, it's not necessarily your job to provide us all the formats we might want. (Though going with Leanpub may provide you with a simple way to make a little money for your troubles.)
Well, I did not say that I really wanted to support other formats. Here are my reasons:
JavaScript has always possessed an inner, lisp-like beauty. CoffeeScript allows that beauty to shine through the surface of the syntax. I have tried in Smooth CoffeeScript to let the visual design reflect that in the way the code and text is presented.
I mentioned that I have tried converters and realized what the problems are (beyond lacking support for hyphenation, kerning and ligatures). The book's text is interspersed with code in a fixed width font. Line breaks and hyphenation marks has to be avoided as much as possible in inline code, because they can be highly confusing - does it mean a minus there or what? Then comes CoffeeScript's whitespace awareness, that means that code blocks have to be scaled, it is very confusing to use word wrapping. I have had to hand manage the typesetting by sometimes tweaking the code text, the font sizes or rewriting sentences to avoid formatting issues.
All my devices are capable of presenting pdf quite well, so I have also not felt the need to produce other formats. I checked at http://ebook-reader-review.toptenreviews.com/ and it seems all ebook readers have some support for pdf.
If the reason for other formats is to avoid Adobe, then on the Mac there is a built-in preview utility with excellent pdf support. On Windows Google Chrome has its own pdf support built-in. With this book Chrome does say that there is something it could not render correctly, but I have not been able to find what that something might be. It looks good to me.
Creating the book in pdf has been quite labour intensive - maybe due to my lack of experience in this kind of work - so the prospect of repeating that a couple of times for HTML and EPUB does not appeal much to me. If someone else feels strongly enough about this to dedicate their time and energy to it - and uses freely available tools to do it - then I will be happy to host the result on the project site.
I'm a fan of Eloquent JavaScript. In my book on CoffeeScript (http://pragprog.com/titles/tbcoffee/coffeescript), I recommend it as a resource for readers who want a thorough introduction to JavaScript. So obviously, I think it's pretty damn cool that someone ported his book to CoffeeScript (albeit with modified examples). The inclusion of Underscore.js as a standard library is, I think, also quite sensible.
Of course, there's a fundamental philosophical difference between my book and Smooth CoffeeScript, which is highlighted on the book's front page:
> Why no JavaScript? Because it is difficult enough to learn one programming language at a time. This book does not assume knowledge of JavaScript or another language.
I, on the other hand, think that it's important to understand JavaScript in order to work with CoffeeScript, and that CoffeeScript is not well-suited to being a first programming language. The situation will improve as tools for debugging CoffeeScript become available, but even then, it's unlikely that you'll use CoffeeScript for a real project without reading documentation (and code) for libraries written in JavaScript.
But hey, I'm happy to see anything that gets more people hooked on CoffeeScript. :)
Smooth CoffeeScript is a book about programming, problem solving, looking into how algorithms work, and learning from it. Those things really appealed to me in Eloquent JavaScript.
Smooth CoffeeScript uses CoffeeScript because it can express the code much more clearly than JavaScript, but the book could have been written in another language; Python for example.
I created it because it was a book I would like to read. It is great that there is now a handful of resources so you can pick what suits you best when you decide to learn CoffeeScript.
Am I missing something? The default area where the book loads is way to small to read anything, and it may be the fact that I'm so zoomed out, but this looks like it was scanned it or something. Blurry and not leveled...
It's also just plain frustrating to read. The first page turn moves the page controls over, and then every subsequent page turn takes almost an entire second for its goofy animation to finish.
Why do so many e-reader/document-reader sites/apps insist on replicating old paper books buy forcing you to pause and watch a dumb animation on every page turn?
