Have you used this ebook to help you create a Windows Store app?

Hello everyone. Kraig Brockschmidt here. It’s been four months since the public release of Windows 8 and my free ebook, Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (which has been in the top 10 free programming books on Amazon for some time, and in the top 20 in Computers & Internet overall). Four months has been plenty of time in which to write apps, and from the growing numbers of apps in the Windows Store, it looks like many of you have been busy with your own submissions.

As always, we’re certainly interested in hearing how you’ve used the book, what you’ve found most valuable, and what can be improved. My editor, Devon Musgrave, would love your feedback via devonm@microsoft.com.

More to the point, though, we’re interested in this question: have you used the ebook to help you create and submit an app to the Windows Store? If so, let us know about your app in the comments. Here’s your chance for some free exposure! And let us know how the book has helped in your efforts.

I’m delighted to say that I use the book myself quite a bit, actually—I didn’t necessarily memorize everything, as you can imagine. That’s also helped me find ways to improve it, everything from minor typos to sections that I’m planning to expand.

With the latter, I’ve been going more deeply into the subject of live tiles, push notifications, and Windows Azure Mobile Services, for example, with a series of posts on the Windows 8 Developer Blog entitled Alive with Activity (still in process, so watch for additional posts in the series). I’m also going more deeply into the subject of JavaScript promises, along with a number of other areas (like testing) that will all feed into a second edition of the ebook. Much of this material I’ve been posting on my blog, https://www.kraigbrockschmidt.com/blog, if you haven’t been following that already.

So let us know what you’ve been up to, and thank you all for making this book a resounding success!