Ever since I first started working for Liferay, I had always planned to release two books: the Liferay Portal Administrator's Guide, and the Liferay Portal Developer's Guide. They were designed to be companion books: one (the Administrator's Guide) would help users get started with Liferay by showing how to install, configure, and use Liferay out of the box. The other (the Developer's Guide) would help developers to use Liferay as a platform to build web sites. I was successful in completing three editions of one of these books: the Administrator's Guide. The other one, though, has been a bit more elusive. If you've read the Administrator's Guide, you've probably even seen the Developer's Guide mentioned in the text. And on more than one occasion, I've had to answer the question, "Where is the Developer's Guide?"
For lots of different reasons, work began on the
Developer's Guide, and then it stalled, and then it began again. Part of it is me: I find it a lot easier to write about functionality that the engineers implement than to write my own code and then explain it. Last year, though, I was doing pretty well with it and had hoped to release a "preview" or "rough" version for 5.2.
But now something really exciting has happened. Liferay has partnered with
Manning Publications to release
Liferay in Action, the official guide to Liferay Portal development! This is a book for Liferay developers which focuses on creating applications and web sites on the Liferay Portal platform, and it fills the same need (and then some) that the
Liferay Developer's Guide would have filled.
This book covers portal development on Liferay 6. Though it is still a work in progress, you can get it right now, thanks to Manning's Early Access Program (MEAP). I have been working really hard on it for the past few months, with the desire to deliver the best possible product to Liferay developers who have been waiting so long. If you want the book early or if you feel like you want to help, you can get involved with the book right away by taking advantage of the Early Access Program. You then get the chapters as I deliver them, and can give me feedback on what works and what doesn't. If you want to get involved, head over here:
I just want to thank all of you who have been so patient in waiting for this--we've seen your forum posts and are doing the best we can to help. I'm very thankful for Manning and their early access program which allows us to get material to you faster while it's still being produced. My blog has been rather scarce of late, but now that I can finally annouce this, I hope to keep it up to date as a journal of sorts of my progress. So even if you don't want to get involved in the MEAP right away, hopefully I'll be able to give you a bird's eye view of what's going on.
