It's an odd situation for me to find myself in, it's great to see a book being published about Notes and Domino again. There's not really been anything of value for the developer since Rocky and Brian's seminal Notes and Domino 6 Programming Bible which was published seven years ago. And I wish I could say that this new book from Packt Publishing was worth buying, but from the point of view of the developer there is really very little of value in here.

What we (and by we, I mean you and I, the gentle, unappreciated Notes/Domino developer) get is 40 pages of basically extended release notes with very little detail about how to do anything with Notes and Domino programming. To take my favourite topic, XPages as an example, there is a single page that just says "and we now have XPages, yay!". There are books of material that could be written about the subject on it's own. It's faintly ridiculous to just skirt over this whole new programming paradigm in a single page.

So what is the point of the book? I've been trying to work out who it would add value to and I am really struggling I'm afraid. I guess, at a push if you have an R6.x based environment and you just want to spend a couple of hours getting the list of new features straight in your head then you could do worse than reading this over a couple of hours. Hardly a ringing endorsement really. The problem that the writers and publisher faces with a book of this style is that it doesn't really know what it's trying to achieve. Now if there was an XPages Bible in the style of Brian and Rocky's book then I would probably end up with several copies but this upgrader's guide is just not any use to me.

new Ajax(url, {
method: 'get',
onComplete: processResponse
}).request();

towards something like this:

new Request({
url: url,
method: 'get',
onComplete: processResponse
}).send();

The other thing which caused us a little trouble was with the tooltips we use on the Dashboard page in IdeaJam. When I say trouble, it took about an hour to fix, we're not talking serious effort here! Anyway, the default CSS settings changed a little, so we just had to add a few extra lines to our CSS file, no biggie.

Finally for areas which you'll want to be careful with, it's third party add on functions and code. For example we use Phatfusion's sortableTable class in the Top Innovator's screen. This was written for MooTools 1.11, so I had to make some changes for it to work properly with the new version.

From an IdeaJam point of view, the reason for the upgrade was so that we can start to use some of the newer Clientcide plugins in areas that may not get much airtime on the public IdeaJam site. One of the main customer feature requests for this new version is what we call the "Implementation Plan", it's the first feature to use some new MooTools functionality, but you can expect more in the next few weeks as we add a new way of linking ideas together.

So why should you use MooTools? Well to be honest, these days most big web shops seem to be going with jQuery and there are a lot more resources out there for that framework. But I still have a soft spot for MooTools, it seems to fit the way I think which is an important consideration when you'll be spending days, weeks or months using the API.

Really the main benefit of MooTools these days is the wonderful Clientcide add ons which handle the UI side of things and the superb documentation and also the core and more builders which allow you to configure the javascript files which make up MooTools to such a degree that it will do exactly what you want, a great boon for managing your deployments.

So what I've come up with is a new website (same URL as before though) at xpages101.net. From here you can see the details of the classroom based course but there's a whole other section of the site devoted to online material. Now to make this work for me (I run a small business on my own and this stuff takes a *lot* of time to put together) there is a charge for the content. But I've tried to make it as appealing as possible.

You have two choices, either a single user account or a five user account. In both cases you'll get full access to the site, all of the videos and support content for a full 12 months. The aim from my side is to keep on adding new videos every week or two for as long as there are interesting things to talk about. I just worked out what I have to create lessons on and it will take me well into May just from my initial list!

Also, to thank you for your early interest in the site, you can use the coupon code "earlybird" at check out and get a 33% discount until February 26th.

So please, go and check out the site, let me know what you think and if you have any areas that you'd like covered the please either comment here or use the contact us form on the site.

I designed the course to cover as much as possible in a day and the price to be low enough that independent consultants and contractors (my background) can afford to send themselves on it.

So I hope to see you in London next week. If you can't make it during the day for some reason then we are also having a LotusBeer gathering in the evening of the 9th February at the Founders Arms from around 6pm. You're more than welcome to come along if you're in the area.

You can get the zip here.

It includes:

• The presentation slides
• The start and final session databases
• Script snippets file