Publishing deal signed with Packt for jME3 Beginner’s Book
We got some monkeylicious news for you. On behalf of the jMonkey team, Ruth Kusterer @zathras has signed a contract with Packt Publishing to write an introductional book about jMonkeyEngine 3 (!!!). The book will target the beginner’s guide category, which should make it suitable for anyone between “just discovered jME” to “been playing with it for a while”.
About Packt
Packt Publishing is a fairly young company, established in 2004. They excel at IT and open source publications. A highly scalable publishing model enables them to collaborate with fairly small projects such as ourselves. Our relationship with them thus far can be sweetly described as friendly and most certainly fruitful.
How it happened
Writing a jME book has always been on our roadmap, but the original plan was to wait until the first stable release. Shortly after the the PacktPub Open Source Awards however (we only made it to finalist), we received an e-mail. Apparently Henry Tong @htong had contacted PacktPub about authoring a jMonkeyEngine beginner’s book, and they were interested! So he passed the brilliant news on to us and formality-grinding followed for a couple months until present day.
As it turns out, Henry is unfortunately unable to co-author this book together with Ruth as we had originally planned, but he already contributed a lot of work to the outline and is still around as a volunteer reviewer; many thanks mate!
Release Date
We don’t have a release date as of yet, only a deadline: December. Assuming we make the deadline, we still can’t estimate the exact time taken from final book submission to print & distribution.
** Hairy hugs go out to all of you who put us on the map of the web in proper screaming-monkey fashion! **
Something about Erlend Sogge Heggen
I joined up with Kirill, thinking I'd lend a hand with basic site management and community building at a time when the project really needed it. A hobbyist partnership grew into a complete team. My role? I talk to a whole lot of people. Sure I do other stuff, but what I do most, and I think best and most importantly, is talk. How I and others see value in my jabbering is not easy to explain, so in the future I plan to talk more about just that.
Awesome! Looking forward to reading it
congratulations!
I’m looking forward to the book! 
That’s darn cool but on the other hand it forces then engine to have a stable API till (say) August…
On the other hand? I thought this would put a sparkle into your eyes
I’d just like to say great job to the jME team and @zathras for making this even possible
i <3 you all, and hope this brings something back in the end for all that have made an effort to make jME engine what it is today 
I know I would be at a major loss in my learning of jME if it wasn't for the time and dedication of @zathras.
Thanks all
Great! Can’t wait!
Hehe, yeah normen it would
But that constraint will put pressure on all of you.
Im buying!
Cool,…congratulation, ruth!
Congratulation, guys!
Is the book going to be released under cc-nc or similar? I will probably buy the book anyway and it would make a great resource to tempt new people into the community especially if it was maintained and added too, like the tutorials on the wiki and potentially replacing them.
Unfortunately I strongly doubt we have a say in the license. The book will be distributed under the standard Packt license. CC-NC will be a possibility in the further off future if we try to self-publish.
Finally! A way for ultra-beginners like me to start weaseling our way in! I’ll inform the other noobs. Btw, not that I want to be that guy, but… how much do you expect it will cost? Should I pull out my wallet or my ski mask?
If you take a look at the other books in the Beginner’s Guide you’ll see they usually cost between £25 and £28.
If and when it can be pre-ordered, I will put my name on it!
Congrats for the deal! Long live jMP/jME3
Thanks, all! I’m as exciting as you are.
Every time I see one of Normen’s jME3 videos I think, “I’d buy that–oh… wait…” X-)
Three cheers to teamwork and all that.
Cool, Great work!
Looking forward to buying a book… dang I feel strange
.
Looking forward to the content… Hopefully a book will elaborate about the SDK and accelerate progress
http://www.lulu.com/ may be a good solution, in case this one ends up being inadequate.
Guys, any news on this book?
Not a whole lot to say really, the information we gave here still stands: Deadline is December, publishing date should follow shortly after that. Ruth is making great progress with the book, so we’re certainly well on track.
Hey guys,
I think that except the normal game beginner’s articles, the book should also touch on creating something like a visualization app(like the one I am currently working on). That would mean explaining integration with swing and multiple windows using offscreen rendering like it is described in the TestRenderToMemory.java file, in order to create a preview. There is not too much info on this out there, but still I could get it working thanks to Normen’s posts on the forums. But I still have some problems in updating everything at the right time.
I might just try the Callable thing(to escape the dreadful “Scene graph is not properly updated for rendering” error), but I haven’t really worked with multithreading before so this will probably take some time. I think I can make it work without using callable(by making some bool value true in the swing button action and calling rootNode.updateGeometricState(); after adding the new view) but I’m not sure about the overhead.
Just saying, it would be much easier if all this stuff was explained in one place:). The engine is great and even though it seems to be geared towards creating games, it can be used by a much wider audience.
Hi,
No news in a while, haven’t seen any announcement. But I’m familiar with the pub industry, so I imagine you’re tuning for perfection.
I’ll volunteer to review the book, or portions thereof. Quals: several degrees in computer graphics, programming experience in OpenGL and J3D but wanting to move to JME, significant teaching and writing experience, have started learning JME from the tutorials.
The online sample of the book, sadly, looks like an expansion of the tutorials. I’m hoping it goes far beyond that. Meeting “my” needs means including a structured summary of a significant portion of the API. JavaDoc is great to look up what you need to know, but as a JME learner who is graphics-literate, I need a solid roadmap through the API. “This is the core of how to use a primitive. Here is a list/summary of all available primitives.” Check out the J3D tutorial, for example.
Drop me a note if interested, I’d be glad to do so.
Thank you very much for your offer, we will definitely keep it in mind.
Is there any fresh news regarding the release date of the book?!!
Any news on the book yet ?