I've mentioned this a few times in passing now but never "formally" announced it. My next book, along with my good friend Brian Rinaldi, will be published by O'Reilly later this year. As you know, I've been blogging and presenting quite a bit on static sites lately, and I'm happy to say that I'm part of a team writing a new book on the topic.
"Working with Static Sites" covers multiple different static site generators as well topics covering publishing your static sites and including dynamic elements in them. What makes this book especially good (in my opinion) is the focus on building different types of sites versus one particular engine. So instead of, "Here's Harp", "Here's Jekyll", etc, we instead talk about a particular type of site being built (a coffee shop, a blog, a documentation site) and then use that need to discuss a particular static site generator. We cover over the basics, then actually build the site in question.
Here's the formal description from ORA and the magnificent cover. You can also preorder the book right now!
For years now, web developers have used powerful application servers like PHP and Node that could create our web apps. But recently there's been a shift between how much we can do on an application server versus how much we can do on the browser itself—as well as what we can do on a mobile app. This practical book shows readers how static site generators provide a powerful middle ground between a full app server deployment and a simple collection of static files.
Written by two leading developers in the JavaScript community, this book teaches front-end designers, front-end developers, web developers, and web designers how static site generators work, the benefits you can expect, and what options are available. You'll learn how to deliver static site files to the end user exactly as they are on the server, without using a server-side language or a database, using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Static websites today are just like vinyl LPs: they’re coming back. With this book, you'll discover just how these websites still fulfill a vital need for bloggers as well as people who just want to disseminate information.
Finally, if you want to watch a presentation of mine on static sites, here is one I recorded last year for O'Reilly: Static site generators: Why use them and how they work