PGAE 3rd ed. is draft complete!

I just submitted the last set of major updates to both Programming Google App Engine books, and am officially declaring them "draft complete." There will be more testing and tweaking during post-production, and all of these changes will work their way through the Early Release pipeline until everybody has the final draft. After that, the print edition ships! Whew!

Prior to post-production layout adjustments, the latest PDFs are printing at nearly 400 pages for each of the Python and Java versions. It's come a long way since the 1st edition, which was 360-some pages covering both languages. Splitting the book into two volumes was a lot of work, but I'm convinced it was worth it. With these new editions, all of the material from the 2nd edition has been updated and cleaned up. Many new sections have been added, most recently an all new chapter introducing Cloud SQL, a new chapter and thorough updates for Python's ndb library, and an updated Python Django chapter. Naturally, I couldn't get to everything on my wishlist, but my ultimate wishlist encompasses all of Google Cloud Platform—not to mention all of web software engineering—so it's in everyone's best interest that I stop here and ship it.

A quick note about Blobstore: A while back I decided to remove the Blobstore chapter that was present in the 2nd edition, since the latest recommendation is to use Google Cloud Storage via the API client library instead (Python docs, Java docs). The Blobstore service is still available, and if you'd like to use it, you can read the Blobstore chapter of PGAE for free on this website.

There's still time to incorporate feedback! If you have the Early Release of PGAE Java or PGAE Python, you should be receiving the latest update soon. Let me know how you're liking the book. And many thanks to all of you who have sent in feedback during the Early Release process, I really appreciate it.

Lastly, the O'Reilly book on Google Compute Engine is now shipping! This book is a great companion to PGAE, especially if you plan to use multiple parts of Google Cloud Platform together. Congratulations to my author colleagues!