Some Thoughts
The process so far has been a lot like writing a bunch of small articles. I’ve handled it in a similar way to writing an album – one track/chapter at a time. Things are definitely overwhelming if you think about the entire work as a whole. If I didn’t segment my work like this, I’d probably stress about it so much that I’d get nothing done. It is often the half way point on a large project like this when you realize just how much things are actually coming together. Quite gratifying.
There are negatives to this entire process as well; I haven’t had a lot of free time for other projects, have had to pass up on some additional development opportunities through Fractured Vision Media, and it’s incredibly hard to balance family life along with everything I do. I’m fairly certain the positives will win out when this is all over though!
Dropbox and Word
I’ve been using the excellent Dropbox service for revisions, automated backups, and simply sharing drafts across my studio machine and laptops. It has made document management absolutely painless and I highly recommend it to anyone involved in such a project. It has provided me with convenience and peace of mind!
On the dark side of things… I’ve been using Microsoft Word for all of my word processing and formatting. Enough said.
Revisions
After submitting the first couple of chapters, I had quite a few revisions to do dealing with formatting and even the structure of a lot of my recipes. It has turned out well though; as the recipes in their current form are quite simple to follow along with. I’ve actually used some of them for reference in my own development work!
While I’ve come quite far; I’m sure there will be many more revisions to come. These are just drafts and I have additional feedback from technical reviewers to work through. Really pleased with the foundation thus far.
Outlook
Like I mentioned above; things are looking good! My editor is pleased with the quality and timeliness of the draft chapters and we are in the process of defining a title, generating promotional copy, gathering technical reviewers, and should be announcing everything on the Packt Publishing site in the next week or two!
I’ll post another update once this has occurred so you can all pre-order ;)
Great work! Having written Head First Geometry for O’Reilly, as well as a more conventional book (not code related), I know the writing-life balance issues intimately.
I just wanted to pop up to say that we found git excellent as a version control system for our books. By committing ‘changes’ rather than atomic files you keep your commit sizes minimal. We did start off with a dropbox style approach, but found that having the paper trail that git creates was really useful.
Microsoft Word? Ouch! What’s that about?
But seriously – good luck with the second half. Tech reviews can be painful but it’s worth it when you get to that ‘it’s done!’ moment.
I can see how Git would work well for versioning of the documents and related code samples. The main convenience with DropBox is that it syncs to all the machines I need to access the documents from. Git would be able to do a similar thing through a remote repository, but I’m (unfortunately) just a baby when it comes to Git :)
The publisher has a bunch of styles and such in Word that marks the text for certain purposes; code, code in text, screen, url, figure… all sorts of stuff.
Still a lot of work ahead! Thanks for popping by.