What I want to share first is the wisdom from a few of our experienced authors and what they have to say about writing. I think one of the most important takeaways is that none of them set out to be authors. Writing a book was just a side effect of being passionate about a topic and wanting to teach others.
So, in alphabetical order, to be diplomatic, here are a few words of wisdom from authors:
About me: I have my own little content business called Electronic Document Design. I also help out over at The Pragmatic Bookshelf in the role of developmental editor and author relations.
I’m excited to participate in this new Content Creators forum.
…our main mission is to help you transition from a paper-based office or home to an electronic, multi-media environment.
I love my Kindle and I really appreciate books that are written with e-readers in mind. In fact this is something I’d love to ask all authors consider when writing; please make your books e-reader friendly. My review of the Ecto book explains what I mean in more detail: Programming Ecto (Pragprog) - #40 by AstonJ - Books - Elixir Programming Language Forum
@AstonJ Good points about the flow of text in the article. I can see where putting the code right before or after the explanation, plus showing the output would be handy for e-readers. I also like your points about reducing cognitive load, and the no flipping rule is relevant even for paper-based books. I’d love to see a book about how to write a technical book (and even thought about co-authoring it). Maybe I’d start with how to write a proposal for a technical book. I think pitching your idea to a publisher is quite challenging for first-time authors (and even some experienced authors).
For me, how you ended the book was incredibly empowering:
Congratulations! You’ve learned a lot ! Maybe you don’t feel like you remember everything, or you skipped over some parts… really, that’s just fine. Programming isn’t about what you know; it’s about what you can figure out. As long as you know where to find out the things you forgot, you’re doing just fine. I hope you don’t think that I wrote all of this without looking things up every other minute! Because I did. I also got a lot of help with the code which runs all of the examples in this tutorial. But where was I looking stuff up, and who was I asking for help?
You should win some sort of award for it Chris! I can imagine that that single paragraph had a profound impact on a great number of people. Even though I had committed to learning programming by the time I got to your book, I wonder whether I might have given up when the going got tough had I not read that? I really can’t overstate how powerful that single paragraph will have been to a lot of programmers. Thank you
That sounds like a really good idea Margaret!!! Do it!!
I vividly remember when it became clear that more and more of our books were going to be read on Kindles or the like and Andy Hunt pushed us to question anything that broke the flow of the narrative. Sidebars, code or images out of place, anything. Flow just gets way more important.
That’s awesome @michaelswaine - it’s great to hear Andy was on the ball and ahead of the times… again!
Another thing I really liked that you used to do, was automatically send updates to books directly to our Kindles - I loved that!
I think you stopped because Amazon withdrew the service? Actually come to think of it, I think they’ve reintroduced it - IIRC, you just need to add the sender’s email address to your list of accepted senders. Might need to check that but it would be awesome to have that feature back!
