Hey HN!<p>I've been working on a book about WebAssembly over the last few months, and it's finally available at <a href="http://levelupwasm.com" rel="nofollow">http://levelupwasm.com</a>!<p>Why a book on WebAssembly you ask? Well... WebAssembly is awesome (obviously ) but it's certainly not the easiest thing to learn. So I wrote this book as a practical intro to using WebAssembly in your web apps.<p>I would appreciate any feedback!
Congratulations on shipping! You accomplished something that vanishingly few people do. You should be incredibly proud of yourself.<p>Always Remember: the people on this site complaining about price are not your customers, and that’s ok. There are <i>always</i> people on this site that complain about price. When I launched my book and it got on here half the comments were about the price instead of the book itself. Ignore them. They’re noise. Focus on selling to your audience.
Nice work. A small note - you might want to redirect http->https on your site, especially as you are taking payments. You wouldn't want a MITM to redirect your customers to another payment processing page.<p>Also my browser is reporting your https certificate as invalid so sort that out too.
Hey congratulations ! Funny enough, I had offers to write a book on WebAssembly, almost 2 years ago, after writing an article[1] on that topic that somehow ranked #1 on HN for a day :) Had to decline but never doubted someone more experienced would write one!<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14495893" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14495893</a>
The capstone project and little pacman game look pretty interesting. Think you can spare a short portion of the book to show what the writing is like? I find them to be some of the best litmus tests of what I'm about to get myself into on a technical book purchase.
Congrats! Any comments on how straightforward you found completing the book? Did you get stuck at any point? What was the most difficult part?<p>Also, do you have a marketing plan? How are potential buyers going to find this?<p>Random SEO tips from a quick look: clean up you heading hierarchy (start with H1, nest H2 - H5 appropriately; right now they're pretty random), add ALT text to all images (the ones with source code could get you more search hits for example), add a meta description and also add HTTPS (very important for security as well).
Congratulations on your book! May I ask why you choose self-publishing road instead of publishing it on publisher? I am not saying one way is better than the other. I am just wondering.<p>Is it because no interest from the publishers? Or is it because you think the royalty percentage from publishers is too low? Or you don't have any particular reason? It's just feel natural to do self-publishing.<p>Also, do you hire editors?
Intersting, I've been looking into this recently and this might be the thing I need to finally get stuck into it. Pricing seems reasonable, I'm not sure about other comments saying it's a little high.
Looks cool!<p>If I don't know any C++ (and never plan to) but am learning Rust, do you think there is value here? Or is really focusing on the C++ -> WASM experience?
This looks really neat! I noticed that it talks about how to call command line programs from my own webassembly program. Does it talk about techniques that could be used for package management, where someone publishes webassembly binaries and people consume them in their own webassembly binary? If so, does that work even when the webassembly "packages" are written in different languages?
Why not place the compiled demos directly on the website?<p>This could show the practicality of the approach, e.g. that the demos work in every browser. It also shows (hopefully) something that can be done only in WebAssembly, and not in plain JavaScript, which can provide motivation to actually learn about WebAssembly.<p>Also, I'd like to see a TOC and sample chapter.
Can you share any data on bounce/engagement/conversion rates for the different packages (eg. X% leave the page without scrolling/reading, Y% read the page but don't buy, Z% actually make a purchase, purchases break down A/B/C% between the different packages)?
How can web assembly deal with per-env variables? Need to recompile for every environment? That means recompile at startup, since I deploy the same artifact to different envs and allow the env to define its vars. For this reason, as a sys admin, I hate web assembly (and most other asset pipelines)
Looks nice. If you are planning to expand this, I would be interested in a comparison of the different toolchains (e.g. Emscripten vs. Go vs. Rust). Currently, I would choose the toolkit of my favorite language, but I have no idea what kind of consequences such a choice has.
Region specific pricing would boost adoption a lot. you can buy full courses on Coursera/other MOOCs for 30bucks in some countries and your pdf+cheat sheet costs more = guaranteed your book shows up on libgen
Honest feedback: Pricing is high.<p>Also, to me, this doesn't look like a good way to use Show HN. A link to Amazon wouldn't be different than what you just did.