Matthew Russell, Director of Advanced Technology, joined Digital Reasoning in October of 2007 and has been making an impact since day one. A talented and dedicated programmer, Matthew’s long hours and creative energy have been focused on improving the Interceptor user interface, architecting web applications and devising innovative ways to embed the company’s core technology platform into commercial products . It has been a busy year for Matthew. Despite the relocation to Nashville and devoting countless hours to the work at Digital Reasoning, Matthew managed to complete his first book -”Dojo - The Definitive Guide” - published by O’Reilly Media and released on June 17th. We talked to Matthew about his book, the writing experience and plans for the future.

Q: What is Dojo?
A: Dojo is a piece of client-side technology - Javascript based - that creates great user experience on the web. It’s a toolkit, technically speaking, it’s something you can use to create a great user experience in a web browser.

Q: What makes Dojo superior to other Javascript toolkits?
A: The overall architecture is very well thought out. It’s industrial strength, it’s battle tested. Big blue chip companies are using it. And it has tremendous breadth and depth. It doesn’t just solve a little narrow problem, it can solve lots and lots of different kinds of problems, but the solutions aren’t just cursory…they are very involved.

Q: How and when were you introduced to Dojo?
A: At a previous company, a colleague and I worked on all these applications for the intelligence community and one really common issue with intelligence datasets was that there was generally a lot of data that needed to be displayed in a tabular format. We started to scope out what other people have done…other technologies in the Javascript toolkit realm and Dojo was on of those. From there, I started to learn all the other things Dojo automates and makes simpler.

Q: What other writing have you done and how did this book come about?
A: I had a great professor while studying Computer Science at the Air Force Academy who was my thesis advisor and he cultivated writing in a way that while writing your thesis you would produce enough materials for white papers and technical papers. I started writing fairly frequently for O’Reilly on the MacDevCenter site at the time. So, I had been doing development for Dojo and thought it would be a neat thing to write about. I sent in a pitch for an article on the topic and it sort of escalated and eventually someone got back to me and said maybe we want to write something bigger…maybe a book.

Q: How long did it take to write the book and what was that experience like?
A: The actual book writing process took roughly 10 months. I signed contract last July and I put the finishing touches on it the first week of June. I would estimate I spent roughly 1200 hours writing the book. One thing about writing a book - it’s not just about knowing the material from a technical standpoint. There’s so much overhead. How do I organize these thoughts? What information do I put in what chapter? What’s the most logical ordering for chapters? How do I keep the content written in such a way that it engages the reader and doesn’t become boring, dry, technical material? I think I stayed true to that O’Reilly style of keeping it fun and engaging the readers. The hardest thing about writing the book in my opinion is that it has always been a moonlighting effort for me, it’s not my daytime job. So, if you can imagine, way more than 50% of your nights and weekends, for almost a year, being taken up. After you’ve been to work, had a long hard day, okay, you come home, eat dinner, bore your family for a while, then sit there for six hours writing till the wee hours of the morning…that’s the hardest part.

Q: What are your expectations for the book?
A: I personally always looked at a book as being successful if it goes into a second edition. It must have been good enough to keep selling beyond that first threshold. I think they’re printing between 8,000 to 12,000 copies of my book. I would be really happy if it goes into a second edition.

Q: As a result of writing “Dojo - The Definitive Guide” you’ve had a few new opportunities to share your expertise on the subject. Tell us about being invited to speak at OSCON, The Open Source Conference, and the June article in Linux Journal.
A: I was encouraged by my O’Reilly editor to submit a proposal for a talk, and I would imagine that having O’Reilly care enough to publish a book on the topic in the first place, probably helped some. Getting in to do the talk wasn’t a given, but having the book probably helped. My OSCON talk is on a component of Dojo called GFX. It’s a sub-project of Dojo that allows a developer to do drawing and animation on the screen using one of many backends…SVG, Microsoft Silverlight, VML and in theory you could plug in any kind of drawing backend into it, you write the code according to this GFX API, pick the backend you want to render it with and it just happens. You write the code once and point it anywhere.

I submitted a proposal for Linux Journal last summer. I was just perusing their site and noticed they had an issue coming out about web technology. I thought it might be a good way to get Dojo out there into the mainstream even further than the book.

Q: What have you learned going through this book-writing process?
A: I’ve really come to appreciate just how much work it is. The next time I see a typo in a book I’m going to give the author a lot more slack than I used to.

Knowing technical content is one thing. Being able to communicate is another thing. Being able to communicate technical content is a third thing. Then writing a book about it is entirely different.

Digital Reasoning is fortunate to employ some of the best and brightest minds in their fields and Matthew Russell is no exception.  You can find his book - “Dojo: The Definitive Guide” on bookshelves now. Subscribers to Linux Journal can click here to read Matthew’s article “Dojo: the JavaScript Toolkit with Industrial-Strength Mojo“.