The DSL book is now at Final Draft, which basically means I'm done with my content and handing it over to production. Copy-editing will begin soon, as well indexing, and various other sundry tasks to turn final text into a book ready to go to the printers.

The book cover follows my series's usual bridge theme, in this case the historic Iron Bridge, which is near where I grew up in England.

Once that is done the production process can start in earnest. I'm working with some really good production people who can work with my automated system, so we hope this will go relatively rapidly. My estimate for physical books on shelves is final quarter of 2010. It's currently looking at around 500 pages total in a DuplexBook split 150/350.

But this is the twenty-first century, so we're not just talking about physical books. Pearson (my publisher, who own the Addison-Wesley brand) does its electronic publishing through Safari books. Safari have a roughcut program that allows books to appear in a part-baked state. (This approach is similar, and influenced by, the Prags beta-books.) If you have a membership of safari books you can access the book and make comments on it. (If you're not a member you can see the TOC, preface, and first chapter.) I haven't yet updated the rough cut to the final draft, but that should happen in the next few days.

I have the advantage of being able to generate the safari files automatically from my own sources - I've been told I'm the first author to automatically generate the files needed for safari using Continuous Delivery like this, so I'm feeling rather smug. (Although the Prags, of course, have doing this for ages - albeit on a rather greener field.)

The material currently on my web-site was last updated in June 2009. While I've done quite a lot of detailed work on the book since, the broad structure is pretty similar, so the website gives a reasonably good picture of the scope of content.