Making the Most of Collaborative Editing with “Live Update”

People are always curious about how we publish SitePoint Books. Normally, when we’re working on a new book, it’s a bit of a “black box.” The author(s) and editorial team will work on a book over a period of months and when it’s ready to launch, we finally get to publish it in its final form and show it to everyone.

That’s all changing with “Live Update”, a new initiative we’re trialling on one of our upcoming books, that we’re all pretty excited about. We’re currently in the process of publishing a new edition of “HTML5 and CSS3 for the Real World”, one of our bestselling books. Instead of just doing the work in private and releasing it when it’s finished, we’re opening up the writing and editing process (via a GitHub repository) for the entire SitePoint and Learnable community to get involved. We chose GitHub because it was easy to integrate, and it’s a service many web developers and designers are already familiar with. That said, even if you’re new to GitHub, we thought this would be a fun way of gaining a bit of exposure to this increasingly popular tool.

We’re constantly innovating to find better ways of helping web developers and designers learn their craft; this trial is no different. For those of you who learn best by digging into text, trying things out and asking questions, this could very well be the perfect project. We also think that it might be interesting for the larger community to get some insight into the writing and editorial process and see just what happens to a SitePoint Book as it gets written.

We hope that you’ll contribute to the update and comment on the book with GitHub Issues as the authors make their updates. Authors Alexis Goldstein, Louis Lazaris and Estelle Weyl have made a start on the update, but we’re hoping that with your input we’ll get an even more useful book that covers exactly what you need and answers your burning questions about the topics at hand.

Sound fun? We’d love to have you participate!

Please head on over to our Live Update page and sign up – it just requires that you have a Learnable and GitHub account. Taking part is pretty easy and everyone who actively participates will receive a mention in the finished book.