What You See Is What You Get
Pragmatic Project Automation has gone to the printers! I'm super happy with the way it turned out. Many thanks to all the reviewers and storytellers who graciously contributed their time and ideas. The outpouring of support on this book was incredible, and I appreciate all of your hard work.
I know I've gushed about this before, but I've truly been spoiled by my publishers, Dave and Andy, and their publishing process. As just one example, I'm still trying to believe what happened in the final days. I was working through comments from the copyeditor, linearly from front to back. Meanwhile, Dave was typesetting in my wake. Let me repeat that: The book was being typeset at the same time I was applying corrections from copyedit. This pipeline turned out to be very efficient as we finished up copyedit and typesetting in just a few days. Then we all proofed the work, of course. And then we proofed it again to make sure the things we caught in the first proof had been properly fixed. OK, we might have proofed one more time, but that's because of what happened next: the PDF was FTP'd to the printer.
See, the entire time we were applying copyedit corrections,
typesetting, and proofing, we were actually working on the PDF that,
in coming days, will get printed on lots of paper. There's no
intermediate stage where the writer's format is transformed into the
printer's format. OK, I take that back; there is a transformation
process, but it's automated. That process is called make
book.pdf, the result of which is the PDF we proofed and sent to
the printer. What you see is what you get. And for me, WYSIWYG
turned out to be a huge differentiator, both in terms of time to
market and quality. We were able to work fast to get this book out to
you in a timely manner, but because there's no intermediate re-entry
of the content, we're less prone to transcription errors. And when
it comes time to make changes, I'll work on the master copy directly,
rather than asking someone to make the changes for me.
Andy and Dave talk more about publishing and other important things in their recent OnLamp interview. If you want to experience an effective and refreshing process, consider writing a book for the Pragmatic Bookshelf.
I'm off to San Francisco next week to hang out with friends I haven't seen in entirely too long. I'll be spending most of my time at that ultra-cool geekfest everybody is raving about: WWDC. :-) OK, so I might go to a session or two at the other conference.