I was talking to some folk at work yesterday, and they suggested that perhaps I'm reading the wrong books. In fact, they might have been a tiny bit less polite than that. So, I whipped up a little recommendation engine last night. Its nothing fancy, but if you want to recommend a book for me, then please do!
Mark Pilgrim is a smart guy, and he's right that the correct time to start writing is while you have that sense of wonder. That was the big difference in the approaches I took with the ImageMagick book (an attempt to be definitive and therefore boring to write), versus the MythTV book (a cleaned up version of my lab book notes from when I installed Myth and got it working nicely, with some other stuff added for completeness). The MythTV book was a lot more fun to write, and I don't feel nearly as burnt out at the end. Read more about Mark's burnout theory. So, I wonder what is next for me?
Just a little status update... The book went to print last night, so I guess that makes me a published author or something. Cool, huh?
Pascal asked in the comments to a previous post about the book about how I was going about writing the book and how the publication process works. It's a good question, and something I meant to cover here anyway, so now seems like a good time. I'll start from the beginning with a brief summary of how I got started with this writing thing. I started off by writing a number of articles for IBM DeveloperWorks. DeveloperWorks are actually really good to work with, all I did to start writing from them was fill in the proposal web form within a couple of hours we'd sorted out what was happening, and off we went. The ImageMagick articles I wrote turned out to be quite popular with the ImageMagick people. I suspect that's why the editor for Apress, a lovely guy named Matt contacted me. He pitched the book to me, and I was originally hesitant. He spent a fair bit of time (a month?) discussing the project with me, and I ended up deciding that because it's fairly closely aligned with the imaging work I'm doing for my PhD, I ended up saying yes. Along the way I wrote a…