First draft of our ASP.NET book is done. Whew!
You wouldn't know it from the recent posts on my blog, but I've been writing a lot lately. Last week I turned in the first draft for the final chapter of the book I'm co-writing with Phil Haack, Jeff Atwood, and K. Scott Allen. It's an ASP.NET "tips and tricks" book, but I think the content is a little different than most cookbook style programming books. The information is geared to strong intermediate to advanced developers, and the topics include things like binary content, search engine optimization, troubleshooting slow queries, log4net, ASP.NET AJAX, etc.
We'd all came into this expecting to work really hard and not make any money on it, the same way we approach blogging. The hard work thing's been true; it'd be nice to be surprised and actually make a little money on the book. Like most developers, I tend to use search engines a lot more than books these days, but I've actually found that my use of technical books has gone up this past year. I'm finding that web searches are better for random access problem solving, but book are more helpful when I need to see information in context or dig deep into edge cases that haven't found their way onto the web yet.
If nothing else, I've now got a book that's very helpful for me. I have a short memory for specifics and am constantly searching my blog and the blogs of the other co-authors for information I've looked up many times before. Now I'm looking that stuff up in the book draft, reading edited and polished copy instead of blog posts. Sorry - I'm not trying to make this sound like a commercial for a book that's not out yet. I'm just wondering (hoping) that this book might be useful to others who work like I do - using search a lot, but relying on a few solid books that beat the search result averages on quality.
Anyhow, now that we're done with first drafts and wrapping up the second drafts, I can direct some energy back to my blog, including some topics that didn't fit in the book.