Book Factory

Published 29 May 07 10:47 AM | despos

I'm on the way planning books for ASP.NET Orcas.

Although the Orcas release has lost along the way some of the rumored features--it looks to me as it's more date-driven than feature-driven--for ASP.NET developers it still has a full bag of goodies.
A new release of my Programming ASP.NET Core Reference book is being planned as I write this for late 2007 or (very) early 2008. Broadly speaking, it will have the following additions:

  • Completely rewritten chapter on Visual Studio
  • New chapter on LINQ and chapters on data binding revised
  • Chapter on server controls will be revised to cover new controls in Orcas
  • New chapter on WCF 
  • Two new chapters on AJAX (partial rendering and services)
  • New chapter on Silverlight

The page count should grow from 700 up to approx 1000.

Great. Now I do have a QUESTION for you. 

Looking ahead, it seems that even a relatively delimited technology like ASP.NET is getting too big to be covered in a single book. If I had to plan a SINGLE book for ASP.NET (Orcas and beyond), I can hardly plan less than 2000 pages for it. Which is definitely too much.

I split my ASP.NET 2.0 book in two parts--Core and Advanced. Maybe that's not the ideal way of splitting contents.

For this reason, in a kind of book factory project, I welcome your feedback about the following points:

  • A single BIG book vs. many smaller books
  • An encyclopedia model for an otherwise TOO BIG book
  • A delta model--get a book once and have it updated through additional chapters
  • What kind of approach you would like to be applied to split content? Task-oriented, broad topics, alphabetical order, other?

Thank YOU

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Comments

# JV said on May 29, 2007 08:20 AM:

I rather see seperate books on these subjects. EG: I can understand that you would like to encorporate LINQ into your book, but your book is about ASP.NET, not data access. Ofcourse when you are creating ASP.NET pages you will have to give some information about how to deal with data.

Unfortunally 90% of the currently available books make the mistake to write a book about ASP.NET which rougly covers for 80% on ADO.NET (And exactly the same information which is covered by 99% of the other books) and tries to put all the ASP.NET goodies in the remaining 20%. Therefor I'm rather a fan of two books: One for data access and one for asp.net or a core/advanced book, which allows you to skip the core version :-)

# Brett said on May 29, 2007 08:47 AM:

I agree on separate books.  I also heartily agree that data access doesn't need to be a big part of an ASP.NET book written by you.  There's plenty of beginner ASP.NET books out there.  LINQ coverage belongs in a .NET 3.5 book.  Or if you'd prefer, the "Core" .NET 3.5 book could cover data access and LINQ, and the ASP.NET book would be 99% ASP.NET.

# Thomas said on May 29, 2007 09:58 AM:

I also prefer seperate books.

An ASP.NET book should focus on ASP.NET.

LINQ is so large that you could write a complete book about it.

# Andrew said on May 29, 2007 11:37 AM:

I also agree with the separate books.  I travel a good deal and I like to bring books with me to read / reference.  The larger the book, the more likely I leave it at home.

# Kevin said on May 29, 2007 12:38 PM:

I also like the seperate books, but also ones that build upon each other.  If you look at the essential ASP.NET series by fritz onion, his second book built on the first talking about the enhancements.  That approach worked for me.

# Kris van der Mast said on May 29, 2007 01:05 PM:

Hi,

because I already own the advanced book myself I would rather love to see the Delta approach to extend that first book (and hopefully it's only 300 pages :-)).

Writing a book about LINQ will indeed cover a whole new book of 1000 pages.

Grz, Kris.

# Jason Haley said on May 29, 2007 03:35 PM:
# Steven Nagy said on May 29, 2007 06:17 PM:

I'd like it to be a single book that is an addendum. That way you only cover the new controls, some LINQ, Ajax, and Silverlight, and how they integrate with existing 2.0/3.0 features. Otherwise I won't buy the book if there's going to be too much repitition. Best if you just turn your existing 2 ASP.NET books into a 3 part series.

# Sal P said on May 29, 2007 11:52 PM:

I have the Core, Advanced and received the AJAX book from Amazon 10 days ago so would prefer the delta. But I'd still buy the books delta or not because they're worth the money just for the problem solving tips. I agree on the separate books.

Now if you could figure out a way to get the FileUpload control to work with AJAX AsyncPostback  ...

Sal

# Pierre said on May 30, 2007 04:32 AM:

To me, what you made on your previous books on ASP.NET (separate Core and Advanced books) seems to be nice... but will it be of any interest to buy the new ones if we already have the previous ? If not, a delta would be the best.

# Braulio said on June 3, 2007 11:12 AM:

Mmm....

 Hard to decide. I would say:

 1. A book with an "intro" to everything it's always welcome when you are starting, or just when you want to get an idea of how things work.

2. Advanced books are needed when you need to deep down in one of the tons of new technologies available.

I would say, go for a beginnners book where you learn the core of ASP .net, and some intro about goodies (AJAX, LINQ, ...), and point to that readers to advanced book if the need to deep down.

For instance, most of developers just want to place two or three ajax controls, and maybe just load data from a Web Services, and they won't bother about internals, ... but some of them will need (or will like to) deep down.

# Pedroafa said on June 5, 2007 04:22 AM:

I prefer books not longer of 400 or 500 pages and very specializing. A book of 1000 pages is imposible to read for me. So, I vote by a book about: LINQ, other about AJAX, other about ASP.NET, other about Silverlight, etc...

# Korayem.NET said on June 5, 2007 07:37 AM:

I also vote for separate books.

When I want to search for a book that talks about a specific topic, I have to look through the index to remember which one talked about that topic although it's more logical to find the topic by it's name!

Example, "which ASP.NET book talked about the updatepanel? was X...or was it Y?". both X and Y are ASP.NET entitled books!

# Keith Harvey said on June 6, 2007 11:00 PM:

Please make it into separate books that make up a set (e.g. The Art of Computer Programming).  Cheers!

# Joshua Thomas said on June 15, 2007 08:18 AM:

One word: Digital

Release chapters as they are done as articles. This way the book is not already 6 month old technology by the time it is released.

Move away from a book model to a online subscription model.

I think releasing a slew of books on a cycle is bad for the enviroment. Specially at the speed tech books age. Most people read your book through Safari or Books24x7 or some other electronic service. If someone is a serious professional they are not spending 50 USD everytime they need a new book.

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# JSON said on July 8, 2007 02:13 PM:

I prefer multiple books.  What I REALLY prefer is a publisher to take a single technology and deliver EVERYTHING.  Not ASP.Net - I am talking about individual CORE - i.e. HttpHandlers and how they REALLY work, incliding the factory and Reflection of the code, improvements, behaviors in IIS6 vs. 7, using JSON instead of XML, etc.

# Murali said on July 9, 2007 11:15 AM:

Seperate books are better ......

# Federico Caldas said on August 8, 2007 08:01 AM:

Separate, smaller and deeper (and cheaper? :). With the Core/Advanced approach I sometimes have difficult to remember "where did Dino treat that issue, was it in the Core or in the Advanced book?" Thay are also uncomfortable to carry for reading when travelling. Wrox' Programmer2Programmer series is a good example of smaller, focused (not too deep, however) books.

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