Professional Apollo

I haven’t mentioned it yet, as it only became officially announced a little while ago, and I was preoccupied with some other stuff the last couple of weeks, but I’m contributing a few chapters to what will be one of the first full-sized books on Apollo (the pocket guide beat everyone, hence the modifier there), Professional Apollo.

Now, when you look at that page, you’ll see a picture of my good friend and former co-worker, Chuck Freedman. And you’ll see a list of names that includes Chuck and some others, but not me. But I really am writing some of the book. The photo is from Chuck’s earlier Yahoo! Mashups book – we didn’t do our photos for this one yet – and the copy is from an early proposal, before I had committed to the project.

Anyway, it’s pretty early and of course writing is a bit slow as Apollo is still evolving. Heck, we don’t even know what the actual name is going to be yet. But it’s shaping up to be a good book. Chuck is heading up the project and has put together a comprehensive team, with people knowledgeable in Flex, AS3, Ajax, and all the web services stuff. Personally, I’ll be doing the least amount of work, in terms of number of chapters/pages. I’ll be doing a chapter on AS3 for Apollo and the File System API, as well as an AS3-based Apollo sample app.

It’s due out in September, and as the time gets closer, I would guess they’ll fine tune the release date to coincide with the release of the final version of Apollo.