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I've just been published!

10 Jun

Back in June last year, I responded to an exciting opportunity to write a collaborative e-book for online media company and information provider, SitePoint. I signalled my interest in writing something about vector languages with a particular focus on SVG and HTML5 Canvas. The folks at SitePoint liked the idea, so I was on-board with a deadline of October to submit my piece.

I decided to write a tutorial on how to build SVG and HTML5 Canvas versions of a game of Noughts & Crosses (Tic-Tac-Toe if you’re across the pond!) as it’s a simple game that many are familiar with. It took longer than I anticipated to build the two versions of the game, but in the end I got there and set about writing words to lead people through the process themselves. I really underestimated just how many words you need to adequately describe a fairly short piece of code, but after many hours of effort I finally finished my draft and submitted it on 26th October 2010. There were no guarantees that my draft would make the grade – especially as it was a pretty detailed technical tutorial – but I hoped it might be good enough. At the very least it had been a worthwhile exercise anyhow – I’d learnt loads.

A few days later, I received an email to say Thinking Web: Voices of the Community (book cover)that the team liked my email – woohoo! I was understandably excited.
A real test of patience followed as my draft was passed to technical editors to work their magic. All went quiet for a number of months until launch day was heralded on
6th June 2011 via a SitePoint Community Blog entry and “Thinking Web: Voices of the Community” was made available as a free download to the public. I was pretty ecstatic and couldn’t sleep properly that night!

Anyway, enough of my ranting! If you’d like to play a game of Noughts & Crosses with a friend, feel free to try out my SVG version or HTML5 Canvas version of the game – hopefully you won’t notice the difference! If you’re a bit more geeky and would like to peruse or download the code, you can do so here.