Sending a copy to Mr Petzold? 
Jeff I am curious. Iâve heard before that writing a book is much like programming: With a goal, driven by a creative process, coorporative issues etc. How would you say it relates now having tried it?
HmmmmâŚIâve got quite a few highly technical books tied to specific technologies that I still find useful to open on a semi-regular basis.
The C Programming Language - KR.
The C++ Programming Language - Stroustrup.
The C++ Standard Library - Josuttis.
Generic Programming and the STL - Austern.
Programming Perl - Wall.
Python in a Nutshell - Martelli.
I guess you just need to pick your specific technologies carefully.
{troll}So, anything not by Microsoft then{/troll}
Writing a book doesnât pay.
My wife wrote a technical book. It did horrible (even she will admit it). However, it did pay - an advance on royalties. For aspiring tech authors, just do the math. Break your salary down by the hour, and then estimate how long it will take you to write the book. Divide and determine if the scale/rate is the same. For most authors, it is just like freelancing after hours.
Anyone can write a book.
I disagree. Although a lack of rock-star talent might not exclude you from getting published, not everyone can write a book. Quite analogous to the field of programming as a whole.
Sorry Jeff, youâre way off base on this one. The âWriting Stuff Statically On Other Stuffâ technology has existed relatively unchanged for millennia. Youâre awfully presumptive to declare it outmoded (even for a single category of communication!) based on this not even half-a-century old technology weâre currently using.
Iâll go out on a limb and say technology books are the single best resource for an overview on a specific technology topic. Sure, if I know all about a particular framework, I can just search the internet for any specifics. But what if I see a technology and ask âwhat the hell is that?â and âdo I want to use that?â and âhow do I start using that?â. Iâve tried to use the internet to answer questions like those, but most often I go around in circles and waste hours upon hours reading blog posts in fractured english or âGetting Startedâ wiki pages that do everything but get me started. Eventually I get to the point where I say, screw it, this is worth the $45.00 and the trip to Barnes and Noble.
Why? Because books are a single, relatively authoritative (relative to blog posts), easy to navigate resource that the internet does not yet match. Thatâs not to say that occasionally someone writes an excellent online reference to a technology, but if youâre using the magical search engine that doesnât force you to plow through outdated, or erroneous, or unreadable, or too specific web postings, Iâd like to know what it is!
So in closing, books FTW.
For me, books arenât just about the content. Itâs also about the format. I hate staring at a screen all day to grok a technology. A good book on the subject helps to save my eyes. When e-readers gain traction, I will only read from paper when an electronic version isnât available.
I am impressed by authors, assuming the book isnât utter trash. You say anyone can write a book. Maybe thatâs true, but with that logic anyone could run 5 miles if they just put in the effort. Even if I have no interest in the book topic at all, I am impressed by the effort behind it. You said it yourself: âwriting a book is hard work.â
Anyways, to each their own. Well done on the book (and this blog) - I hope it sells well.
Not sure I agree with the blanket âtechnical books are obsoleteââŚ
While I completely agree with the sentiment as far as learning to program goes, Iâve found a couple of technical books that serve as a definitive source of information - highly detailed stuff like âInside SQL Serverâ simply isnât available online, nor would I trust blog or forum posts to be accurate anywayâŚ
I guess it comes down to the âEncyclopedia vs Wikipediaâ argument - definitive knowledge is very hard to find in a medium where anyone and everyone has a voice.
Iâm going to assume that your arguments apply only to technical books, because they donât hold up for books in general. (With an editor, your blog post probably wouldnât come across sounding as such!
The reasons you mention regarding authoring a book not being that glamourous are well known to people who look into writing a book. âAnyone can write a bookâ is often used as some kind of argument against writing when it is clearly a truism; people have known this since literacy became widespread. That writing is hard work and doesnât pay are also well known aspects to the job. Anyone who believes that crafting thousands of sentences and paragraphs in some fluid manner is easy has romanticized things far too much (âThe grass is greener over there, right?â). When pressed, I doubt many people truly believe that the opposite of what you say is true.
Frankly, lots of writing doesnât lend itself to online reading just yet. Mathematical treatises and deep explorations of topics are awful to read online for extended periods of time (Iâll take the $10 printing of The Origin of Species over the Project Gutenberg version any day). Reading creates our own internal wiki, if you will, and no number of links can capture that. Sometimes itâs best to give you the ability to capture visceral memories regarding where that link is almost instantaneously. Physical books provide this right now. Online reading doesnât.
Not to say that it wonât. Iâm not foolish enough to think that it never will, but Iâm also not arrogant enough to assert that reading on my laptop is as enjoyable as carting around a text. While flipping through pages is a helluva lot faster than scrolling through PDFs or waiting for a page to load, if something like digital paper delivers on its promises, I wonât feel bad about carting around the digital versions of my books.
An anecdote on technical books: I recently picked up The LaTeX Companion. In the mere month that Iâve had it, itâs been more valuable than searching the Internet and online help sources has been for the past 8 years. It explains things coherently and provides insight into the commands. However, I believe this case is an outlier. Nevertheless, technical books arenât dead yet â and in my experience, they are usually much more enjoyable to read than random blog postings and poorly formatted documentation.
(This may be behind a pay wall for you and if it is, contact me and Iâll gladly send you a copy. Itâs a good read about the future of books: http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2007.09-media-apocalypse-soon/)
Jeff,
Thanks for the comments.
Maybe it is more accurate to say many specific technologies books arenât âkeepersâ. I have, like you, some of the venerated programming books that will grace my shelves for years to come (Code Complete!). I just picked up âJava, Concurrency in Practiceâ a week ago knowing full well that it isnât going to last forever. Writing good multi-threaded, scalable, server software can be a difficult task and this book from Brian Goetz is supposed to be the âbibleâ on Java concurrency. The practices and concepts will be outmoded by whatever comes after Java 6 (since it is written squarely aimed at 5 with a peek at 6), but it suits my purposes well and the 'net doesnât contain the wealth of pointed information on the topic that I need to do a good job.
So, some are keepers, some will fade to obscurity. If I had to write an application that was ASP 2.0, I might consider grabbing a book if I couldnât find one or two really good web primers on the topic.
Just sayinâ.
g
I just ordered this book on Amazon and didnât even realize that you were one of its authors! Iâm currently working on a project to convert an ASP web application to ASP.NET 2.0. Iâm not finding a lot of helpful information on the Internet. Yesterday I worked out how to allow the user to change the web siteâs theme but I had to cobble together two techniques because I could not find a complete example. And I canât find any decent sample code for web parts because everyone just repeats the same basic tutorials which donât serve any useful purpose. I bought your book because I hope it provides something more than simplistic article fodder.
I noticed that Amazon now allows video reviews and I definitely want to create some videos about my favorite books because it is an excellent way to get the attention of an author.
Kudos, Jeff. I appreciate the amount of time and effort you put into this blog. Iâm going to pick up a copy of the book because not doubt it is of high quality too!
Always a fan of coding horror,
Matt
Hey Now Jeff,
Congrats on the book.
Coding Horror Fan,
Catto
So whenâs the ASP.NET 3.0 (Beta 2) edition coming out? If I buy it will I be able to get a discount on the ASP.NET 3.0 (Final) edition?
âAnyone can write a book.â
Yeah, but the ones who do get beaucoup consulting gigs, speaking fees and opportunities to network.
Yeah, the technical book publishing racket sucks. But as the first person to read the book cover to cover (I did the technical review/sanity checking), I must say the force is strong in this one.
That and until I get comfortable taking my laptop to the crapper or to the beach, books and newspapers have a place in this world.
Thank you for an honest, well-written article. A lot of what you say is correct. Most technical books have a useful shelf-life of 24 to 30 months, and many are toast when the next version of the product comes out. But it you are lucky, smart, talented and experienced, you might get to write a timeless tome, such as Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides (1995), or The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master (1999) by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas.
You should setup your amazon.com page, so people can read inside of your book (i.e. see the table of contents).
I think that is the best feature of amazon.com is seeing the TOC and a sample chapter from the book.
I may buy this book (against your suggestions) just because Iâm a huge fan of your blog and K Scott Allenâs blog and I want to see what kind of book writers you guys are.
anyone who says âanyone can write a bookâ has never watched the jerry springer show! 
I have half of a bookshelf worth of technical books behind me (I didnât buy them, my employer did). The only one Iâve ever cracked open is an OâReilly âXML in a Nutshellâ book, and that one only about 3-4 times. Yes, technical books are completely and totally worthless.
Any chance youâve got the post-publication case of âI finally finished this pig and I never want to see another book againâ blues? Itâs taken me months to get over that state after finishing co-authoring the 1300 pages of âWindows Developer Power Tools.â
Yes, Iâm biased, but I believe tech books will always have a solid place. Everyone learns differently, everyone groks different media. I can remember references in a book read years ago, but I canât find that *#^@||!! blog post I ran across last week that solved my issue with blocked progress bar updates (and solved world hunger at the same time).
In any case, congrats on finishing up a great-looking book. Youâre a great writer, you got great co-writers, and you had a great publishing house put out the book.