Two finished titles, one bundled ebook, and two canceled books still in the tree

Sync & Async and ES.Next & Beyond are canceled, and their folders are not deleted

The title list carries explicit status labels, and two of them are cancellations. Sync & Async and ES.Next & Beyond are both marked canceled, with the text struck through, and the remaining pair inside the ebook are marked Objects & Classes as a draft stable and Types & Grammar as a rough draft. Only Get Started and Scope & Closures carry no such caveat.

The directory listing does not agree with that signal. The top level still contains sync-async/ and es-next-beyond/ alongside get-started/, objects-classes/, and types-grammar/. So a reader who navigates by folder rather than by the title list will find two directories of abandoned material sitting next to the current ones, with nothing in the path itself telling you which is which. That is the practical trap for anyone linking into this repository: a deep link into a chapter directory looks exactly as legitimate as one into a published book. The status lives in one place on the front page and nowhere else, which means the burden of checking it sits with whoever is citing the material.

The Unbooks is one ebook holding two chapters at different draft stages

The third title is called The Unbooks and is sold as a single ebook, with a Leanpub page and an Amazon listing, rather than as two separate books. Inside it, Objects & Classes is labeled a draft stable and Types & Grammar a rough draft. The first two titles each have their own directory, their own Leanpub page, and their own Amazon listing.

What the bundle cannot do is give you a uniform guarantee. One purchase delivers a chapter the author considers stable in draft terms and a chapter he considers a rough draft, and there is no per-chapter status inside the ebook itself. If you are citing the Types & Grammar material, the citation inherits the roughness, and if you cite the whole ebook as a finished third volume you are overstating it. The reading order given is Get Started, then Scope & Closures, then The Unbooks, which is also the order of increasing roughness in practice. There is also no separate purchase for either chapter, so a reader who only wants the stable one pays for the bundle and has no way to signal which half mattered to them.

The default branch is 2nd-ed and the first edition lives on another branch

The default branch of the repository is named 2nd-ed, and the first edition is reached through a link to the 1st-ed branch's README. That branch split is the first thing to internalize, because it is not cosmetic. A link you copy from an older article, a forum answer, or a chat log will very often land in the 1st-ed tree, where the titles and the chapter material are from the earlier series, and nothing on that page announces itself as superseded.

For a reader, the consequence is that you need to know which edition you are holding before you compare anything to your own experience of the language. The motivations and perspective behind the series are set out separately in preface.md, which is the file to read first if you want the author's reasoning rather than the chapter list. The front page also states that the books are readable online in the repository entirely for free, which removes the commercial question entirely for anyone deciding whether to start.

The series is complete and closed to pull requests

Contributions are shut. The statement is that the book series is now complete and not open to further contributions, followed by thanks to those who were part of an 11 year journey. That is a firm position rather than a soft one, and it is worth taking at face value before you invest time.

The tree still looks like an open project, which is where the confusion comes from. CONTRIBUTING.md and PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md both sit at the top level, alongside .editorconfig and the .github/ directory. So the scaffolding for a contribution workflow is present while the policy says the work is done. A reader who files a pull request to fix a typo or clarify a paragraph is spending effort on a repository that has told them it is finished, and the presence of a template does not change that. The stated exceptions are financial rather than editorial: GitHub Sponsorship, Patreon, and PayPal are listed as ways to contribute to the effort and to other open source work by the author.

NoDerivs blocks the adaptations readers usually want

The license is the constraint that shapes what you can do with the text. The materials are copyright 2019-2025 Kyle Simpson, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Unported License, and the repository carries that as LICENSE.txt. Repository metadata reports the license as unasserted, so an automated compliance check will not tell you the terms; you have to read the file.

Three clauses matter for a reader planning something with this material. Attribution is required. NonCommercial blocks using the text in paid work, which includes internal corporate training material and consulting deliverables, not only resale. NoDerivs is the one that surprises people: it rules out translations, adapted or abridged editions, and remixed compilations, so the obvious way to make the series more accessible to your own team or language community is not permitted. What remains available is reading it, quoting it with attribution, and linking to it. The metadata mismatch is the practical hazard here, because a tool that reports no license lets you assume terms you do not have.

Free online, self-published through GetiPub, sold on Leanpub and Amazon

The publishing arrangement is deliberately small scale. The second edition is self-published through GetiPub, and the published books are made available for sale through normal book retail sources, with both a Leanpub and an Amazon link given for each of the three titles. The stated model is that you can read the books online in the repository entirely for free.

That has a clear consequence for what you are paying for. Since the online text and the retail text are the same work, buying does not unlock additional chapters or an earlier draft; it buys a formatted, portable version and it funds the effort. For a reader deciding between the two, the deciding factor is reading comfort rather than content access. For an organization, the NonCommercial clause and the self-published retail route together mean there is no volume licensing path described here at all, so anyone wanting to use this as internal training material has to look elsewhere for permission.

Frontend Masters sponsors the first two books and sells the author's courses

The sponsorship section names one company and ties it to specific titles. The first two books of the second edition are described as exclusively sponsored by Frontend Masters, with a credit to Marc Grabanski and the team for the support of the author and the books. The platform is described as offering over 150 courses on frontend technologies, and the author notes that he teaches all of his workshops through it.

Two things follow. The first is that the sponsorship covers Get Started and Scope & Closures only, so the third title, The Unbooks, sits outside the arrangement that funded the first two and is the one you are most likely to find still in draft. The second is a disclosure worth naming for a reader weighing the recommendation: the same organization sponsors the books and is where the author's paid video courses live, and the page says so plainly rather than hiding the relationship. Neither point makes the sponsorship a problem, but both are the kind of detail that is easier to respect when you are told than when you go looking for it.

No releases, no tags, and a last commit in February 2026

There is a mismatch between a series described as complete and a repository with no version history to check. The repository publishes no GitHub releases, the default branch is 2nd-ed, and the last push was 2026-02-15. The copyright line runs 2019-2025, which lines up with the series finishing and the repository settling.

What that means practically is that you cannot ask what changed and when. There is no tag to check out for the state of the text you read a year ago, and no release note to tell you whether a chapter was revised after you last visited. If you are studying rather than tracking, this hardly matters, because the material is meant to be read once and slowly. If you are citing specific passages, or building a reading list that others will follow, then the only version marker available to you is a commit date, and the only status markers are the labels on the title list. Check the labels and the date of the specific chapter before you build anything on it.

Editorial conclusion

Read the second edition in the order given, free in the repository, and treat the Unbooks chapters as material in progress rather than as a finished third volume. Do not plan a translation, an adapted edition, or commercial training material on the text, because the license is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Unported, and do not file a pull request, since the series is explicitly closed to contributions. Before you rely on a chapter, check its own status label and the last commit date of 2026-02-15, because there are no releases to compare against.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Official documentation
2. Official README
3. Project repository