PGAE September Update
Work on the new editions of the book continues, sporadically as always. My writing method follows a cyclical pattern: work intensely at the day job while feeling guilty about the book, panic, write 50 pages in a week, repeat. I've fallen behind my original schedule, but it looks like all of the updates to the existing material are about to wrap up soon. Then I can focus on adding all-new chapters up until the end of the drafting schedule.
The next Early Release update includes the completed introductory tutorial, extended chapters on configuration and request handling, and an all-new chapter on modules. I had originally intended modules to be a small section in the request handling chapter, but I decided it was too important a topic to cut short. Some readers might be interested in the newly added instructions on setting up SSL with a custom domain via Google Apps. And there are minor updates throughout.
The previous Early Release releases had some issues with missing diagrams. This is a technical issue with publishing that we hope to have resolved soon. Later chapters still have some out-of-date screenshots of the old App Engine Console that I'll be replacing soon.
There are several upcoming features of App Engine and Cloud Platform that haven't been officially released yet that I'd like to include in this edition. Of course, I can't say what they are, though I can mention one example, since it's already in public preview. The gcloud app command will be replacing the dev_appserver and appcfg commands, and if this leaves preview within our time window, I'll go through and update all of the example commands accordingly. You can try out the preview version today by installing the app component with gcloud components update app. During the preview, the command is called gcloud preview app. Of course, things may change a bit during the preview, and the dev_appserver and appcfg commands will continue to be available for the time being.
Thanks to everyone who completed the reader survey! I can't promise every requested feature will get into the text, but it's great to know what everyone is working on and what features would be useful.
Don't have the Early Release yet? Get the draft in progress as an ebook today, and receive all updates up to the final version for free:
Let me know what you think!
