Marcos Placona
Marcos Placona
Developer evangelist at Twilio, GDE and in ❤️ with Open Source
2 min read

Categories

  • Books


I am a published author

A few months ago I was contacted by Packt Publishing about a new project they had in mind and thought I’d be a good fit for.

The challenge was to write a book about one single topic that would enable readers to learn and become proficient on that topic in about an afternoon.

Anything with 200 pages would be too much, so I had to keep the book very lean while keeping the reader interested, and giving her enough ground to be able to build a final project just with the information contained on the book.

I had a pre-set topic as well, and had to stick to about 35 pages of content. If you remember, a while ago I wrote an article about how to do drag and drop with jQuery.

While the article was only about dragging and dropping DOM elements, I was asked to write a book on how to drag entire layouts on the screen, and allow users to fully customize their experience.

I set off by providing the publishers with a proposal of what I thought the structure of the book should be, and decided to use Gridster as the plugin for drag and drop.

If you haven’t heard about Gridster, it’s a very nifty jQuery plugin that allows you to do layout drag and dropping, and has lots of cool API functionalities embedded in it that allow you total control over your layout’s mobility, and immediate feedback on all your elements.

On the book, I take the reader through the whole process of downloading and adding the library to their website, until the point they can actually create a fully functional metro styled layout that allows users to drag and change positions on every item on the screen.

So without further ado, here’s my book…

Instant - jQuery Drag-and-Drop Grids How-to

jQuery Drag-and-Drop Grids How-to

jQuery Drag-and-Drop Grids How-to

It’s available on all major stores such as:

Amazon UK

Amazon.com

Safari Books Online and I hear B&N are also stocking it, but sadly it’s not yet available on their website.

Hope you enjoy it! 😉