A few years ago, I was very much into writing technical articles for magazines. My most profilic years were from 2001 to 2002 and I published about 6 – 7 articles in various magazines, including Javaworld, Java Report and Dr. Dobb’s Journal. At that point in time one of my greatest ambition was to write a full-length technical book (on Java of course) for O’Reilly. I had racks of books by O’Reilly (close to 40 I think), mostly Java related and I had a burning desire to display my very own O’Reilly book among them.
I submitted a proposal of course, and other proposals to other publishers but sadly none went through. After a while the burning desire simmered underneath other more critical issues like surviving the dot-com bust and the elipva Incident as well as other rising interests like my growing interest in Law.
So when I saw a mail in the Ruby on Rails mailing list calling out for contributions for an O’Reilly Rails book, I jumped at the opportunity. No doubt, my contribution is pretty small compared to the rest of the book (I contributed only 3 recipes) but at least I have made a small step towards it. Who knows, it may spark me again to start an O’Reilly book proposal again :)
Best of all O’Reilly is giving me 4 books (besides a token sum) as a gesture of appreciation. Time to stock up on the O’Reilly books again! Any suggestions on what to get?
Congratulations! My only recommendation is to get Ruby Cookbook to complement your Rails Cookbook. I have it in deadtree form and it’s great for leisurely flipping through a random page to read a recipe.
Any hints what your 3 recipes are?
Thks! My few recipes are concerning creating web mashups using Rails.
Hey, congrats!! Glad to hear that.
Grats man, good to see one of your dreams fulfilled (partially :P). I guess in a way I was lucky to have a publisher approach me instead of the other way around… Of course, O’Reilly is on a whole different level of technical publishers.
Haha, thks! I wished I had someone approaching me to publish :( How did you manage that?
Ah… Same way you did really, through blogging. And to some extent I knew the SitePoint guys through moderating their forums.
It’s great that you took the time to write all this up; it’s great to see another’s opinion. I respect your work on this post, and I’ll return for more reading.