PhoneGap Essentials Sales

Posted: July 3, 2014 | Categories: Mobile Development

I keep hearing from readers who have just started reading my PhoneGap Essentials book. That book was published more than two years ago and PhoneGap has changed dramatically since then. The code in the book should still work - not much has changed on the API side of things. The content covered in the first half of the book however is no longer valid.

I rewrote the first half of PhoneGap Essentials last year and released it as Apache Cordova 3 Programming in December. That book takes the first 150 pages dedicated to PhoneGap development and PhoneGap tools and updates it for Cordova 3 plus expands it out to about 250 pages. There's an additional 50 pages on the APIs that covers them at a high level, but if you have the Essentials book you have the same information (just a little older).  You can read more about the book at www.cordovaprogramming.com.

The second half of PhoneGap Essentials was all about the Cordova APIs, about 150 pages worth. I just finished rewriting that content (and expanding it to about 300 pages) and published it as Apache Cordova API Cookbook - the book will be in stores in about a week. You can read more about the book at www.cordovacookbook.com.

With these two books, you've got 600 pages of coverage for Cordova 3.

I think what's happening, please correct me if I'm wrong, is that while the people I work with use Cordova, much of the world only knows of it as PhoneGap. I'm wondering whether not having PhoneGap in the title of my latest books is somehow hurting sales. As PhoneGap is a distribution of Cordova, you'd think that a book on Cordova would address both markets. If I change future book titles to have PhoneGap instead of Cordova in them, I may lose out on an audience that's interested in Cordova and not PhoneGap. Sigh.

I tried to post a comment on the Amazon listing for PhoneGap Essentials letting folks know there was an updated version of the book available. Amazon refused to publish it.

I'm getting ready to start work on Apache Cordova 4 Programming, with a planned release of very late this year (December at the earliest) but probably early next year. I'm planning on expanding this book considerably and hope to get about 400 pages of content in there. When I get done, between the two books, I'll have published more than 700 pages of content on Apache Cordova.

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