Preface

I was sitting in the back of the Liferay Car (yes, Liferay owns an old, beat-up Toyota Corolla), and Brian Kim, Liferay’s Chief Operating Officer, was sitting next to me, giving me a hard time. I was already uncomfortable in the back seat: I’m 6′2″, and my knees were up next to my ears. But it was only a short trip from the Liferay Symposium hotel in Anaheim, CA, to Brian Chan’s house (where we and the other occupants of the car were staying), so I wouldn’t have to endure the cramped quarters for long.

You see, I’d written a couple of editions of Liferay’s Administrator’s Guide, but its companion volume, the Developer’s Guide, had suffered several aborted attempts at getting off the ground. It had finally achieved some semblance of completion, but it wasn’t yet where I wanted it to be. The problem was, I needed to release some developer documentation soon, so I could get to work on the training materials and the documentation for the next release of Liferay. For this reason, I’d resigned myself to publishing what we had and then attempting to make the next edition of the book more complete. We’d been self-publishing the Administrator’s Guide, so I thought we should do the same with the Developer’s Guide, particularly because it wasn’t going to be as complete as I wished.