I stumbled upon a blog post by Baron Schwartz, the author of High Performance MySQL, today apropos of nothing. He wrote about his experiences writing the book in What is it like to write a technical book? His editor followed up and Baron finished with some final comments. I’ve always liked writing and found this long post very informative – and, as a geek, I especially liked his use of regular expressions to catch some bad habits he had.
This is turn led me to What I’ve Earned (And Learned) From Writing “Beginning Ruby†by Peter Cooper. Although, I must confess, I’m somewhat uncomfortable with his position on pirating his own book.
The conclusion I draw from these and other posts is that unless you have an extremely popular technical book, don’t give up your day job. Looks like I’ll be shepherding packets and wrangling servers for some time to come!
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