|
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.
|