You think I'd learn!

Tuesday, January 06 2009

Nearly three years ago, I wrote the following blog post:

Reason # 4218 why I don't think I'll ever write a book
From Chris Sells' blog:

Then Mike read all 1300 pages, making sure that the copy editor didn't change the meaning of anything.
With the PDFs in hand, we both read the ~1000 pages again (the move to Quark puts in the final styles), looking for things that got messed up during the move between software packages or new things that we notice.

Egad!

I have a feeling that Charles Petzold is doing the same about now, since on 4/5 he said he had one more month before his 1000 page WPF book is due.

 

This post came to my mind today as I near the end of the second review of my 800 page book. Reading that blog post certainly makes me laugh...at myself! I'm doing just the same thing that Chris and Mike did. I went through all 800 pages in the late fall after the copy editor worked on it and worked back and forth with her until all of her questions and any changes I didn't like were worked out. 

Then the whole thing was put into PDF format and I have spent the past two weeks reading through the PDF very carefully, all 800 pages again, to make sure everything is okay. Of course, I've found a million things I didn't notice before or have learned since and have many pages of notes for the editor who will probably pass out when she returns from vacation and sees them.

It's astonishing to think of the amount of time that I have put into this project over the past 10 months. Especially considering that I sometimes have a short attentions span. This latest review alone might add up to something like 70 or 80 hours. It's like  full time job. But to me, it's more than worth it. It seems pointless to go to all this effort and not make this book the best that I can.

Comments

Pascal said on 1.07.2009 at 3:30 AM

I am reading the rough cuts at the moment and learning a lot about the entity framework. But the rough cuts version is sometimes a bit "messy" and hopefully i will have the final version in my hands soon, thanks to your effort! The book, as far, is really good! Go on!

Pascal

Julia Lerman said on 1.07.2009 at 3:30 PM

Hey Pascal.

Yeah the rough cuts are from before the copy editor worked on the book and before my regular editor gave me suggestions for better organization and flow. Plus I’ve learned even more and am tweaking things one last time before heading to the printer.

I don’t know what OReilly’s m.o. is with respect to pushing updated versions of chapters into the Rough Cuts.

I’ve been told that it’s all heading to the printer sometime next week. Amazon says “February 3rd” but the production editor told me that is incorrect and it should be out sooner than that.

Just as an FYI, I’ve refactored the samples in the last chapters one more time so they will be better architected.

But I’m glad people were able to get their hands on the content, even if it was a little "rough" without waiting until the printed version is available.

Julie

Pascal said on 1.09.2009 at 5:22 AM

Thanks for your response!

If I got the right idea of the O'Reilly's Safari project, I would be able to download the finished book as PDF, cause once the book is finished the rough cuts version should be equal to the final version.

Last update according to the information in my O'Reilly account is 2008/12/02.

I hope I'll be able to download an updated version.

Especially in Chapter 13, which I am studying atm, most of the examples for c# are missing.

Pascal