The first sentence really stops me from reading it
jQuery is a very powerful library, but some of its powerful features are obscure, and unless you've ready the jQuery source code, or my new book jQuery Pocket Reference, you may not know about them.
Why don't you give me the article first, let me read it, get amazed by the techniques and then find out about you and your book and feel like I need to read another book.
This way I feel like you are trying to sell me your stuff.
Perhaps because you are reading an article in O'Reilly's website, whom sells David Flanagan. That out of the way, I thinkn he's entitled to a little self promotion at any point in the article since this is the man behind such gems as JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, and The Ruby Programing Language.
He is trying to sell you stuff, but honestly you should go right ahead and buy what he's advertising because his books are really that good.
Yeah I noticed it too late to edit the post. I'm on the 30th hour of a coding marathon and I'm starting to feel my neurons burning up and leaving me numb as hell. You can easily spot places where my train of thought kind of crashed into a wall. Oh well, c'est la vie.
What's wrong with him trying to sell his stuff to you? It's not obtrusive, the content is valuable. Heck, he's not even selling you, via adverts.
Are you under some illusion that sites run by for-profit companies have a primary purpose other than to sell you their stuff?
Maybe it's a little offputting. But I'd put dollars-to-donuts that if it was A/B tested, they would generate a lot more revenue with the notice at the top. (Edit - just noticed there was no purchase link, so it would need to be changed to easily A/B test...)
Especially considering these are almost all jQuery 101 tips, e.g. things people learn within the first month of using jQuery. It's not like these are crazy secrets. I was also quite put off by the "check out my book" reference in the very first sentence.
jQuery is a very powerful library, but some of its powerful features are obscure, and unless you've ready the jQuery source code, or my new book jQuery Pocket Reference, you may not know about them.
Why don't you give me the article first, let me read it, get amazed by the techniques and then find out about you and your book and feel like I need to read another book.
This way I feel like you are trying to sell me your stuff.