Back in 2016 I wrote a book called Practical SVG.
Recently, the publisher, A Book Apart, closed shop.
Now you can Read Practical SVG on the web, here on this site, for free. I always like how Mat’s book was online so now mine can join that cool club. I’ll echo what I say on the site:
Thanks to Jeff Eaton for Dancing Queen, the technical project that capably extracted the contents of the final
.epubfile that A Book Apart originally produced. And then Mat Marquis for building this Eleventy site that took those contents and made them into this nice website
Why read a book about technology from 2016? Jeez then don’t — no skin off my ass lol. But really, in case you’re a front-end developer who’s never used SVG before, it might still be worth a look. The cool thing about SVG is that very little has changed with it. It’s an awfully slow moving technology. The stuff that will feel dated is stuff like using Grunt for the icon system and stuff, which is not particularly in vogue.
How did I get the rights to publish it here? … you ask, chinhands.
When A Book Apart went kaput, us authors banded together (uh, got in a group Slack) and just talked. There was venting, planning, writing, joking, and ultimately we made a collective ask to acquire the rights of our books. They agreed, so many authors are in various stages of getting their book back, updating things, and making them available again however they see fit. Many authors are exploring the various ways to keep selling it, the lowest friction up-front way is to continue to use Ingram, but I imagine you’ll see other various creative alternatives as time goes on.
Ethan just wrote about all this and his books are still available for purchase. Sara Wachter-Boettcher and Eric Meyer’s book is also still available and Eric wrote up their journey here. In both cases, the books are significantly cheaper.