Nigel McFarlane, author of O’Reilly’s Firefox Hacks as well as Rapid Application Development with Mozilla (both books I owned before coming to work for O’Reilly), has passed away. I don’t know the details, and found out about it first via Ben Goodger’s blog.

A quick search for “nigel mcfarlane” on Feedster turned up more details, saying not much more than he passed away suddenly and was a passionate evangelist of the open source and Mozilla community.

I saw him give a presentation last August at the Mozilla Developer Day conference, and I’ve heard people remark that before Firefox became mainstream, Nigel was the sole person out there writing articles on Mozilla development and technology.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.