I mentioned earlier today that my latest book project has gone to copyediting. To forestall a few questions:
Are you the sole author?
Good heavens no. Most of the heavy lifting was done by my colleague
Eric Carter. I’m just along to make sure that his love affair with the comma doesn’t get totally out of control. And I wrote a chapter or two here and there.
What’s the deal with writing a technical book?
I was going to write a long article about that, but fortunately
Eric Gunnerson did me a huge favour by writing it for me. I agree 100% with everything Eric says in his article.
If you are in it for the money and not the fame, I recommend becoming an expert in some technology and becoming a technical reviewer/editor. Though it’s less money, its way more dollars per hour unless you’re planning on writing a best seller. O’Reilly, APress and McGraw-Hill have given me good tech editing gigs over the years. It’s nice to have a hobby that pays for all your other hobbies.
What’s it about?
It’s a Tom Clancy-style page turner with lots of beautiful, deadly women, men who carry powerful handguns, and a plot to take over the world by improving knowledge worker productivity through adding managed customizations and add-ins behind Word, Excel, Outlook and Infopath.
What’s the title?
Well, I wanted to call it "Programming Customized Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft InfoPath Customizations and Add-Ins With Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2005 Tools For the Microsoft Office 2003 System In Microsoft Visual C# .NET" because haven’t you heard,
long book titles are totally in this year. Sadly, my coauthor and our editors cut that down to "Visual Studio Tools For Office Using C# with Word, Excel, Outlook and InfoPath". Not a single ".NET" or "Microsoft" in there!
Check out this swanky cover design:
Where can I get a copy?
If you happen to be at TechEd, Addison-Wesley is giving out free samples, or
you can download the sample in PDF form. (Note that, as it says in the PDF, this is a straight-from-the-devs drop of the text. The table of contents is in the wrong order, we probably use "which" where we should use "that", and so on.)
The book should be available in stores and at the Los Angeles Pro Dev Con in early September.
I’m just glad that most of the authors’ end of the work is done. That was a whole lot of weekends.
