Novel-in-a-month, in December 2001. 50k words.
Ask HN: Have you written a book?
11–20 of 56 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?
#12A Thesis and a Dissertation, do those count?
Sure - but I'm mostly curious to learn what kinds of experiences good hackers have had in trying to get their ideas out there. The publishing industry just seems terribly archaic, and most people trying to write books are locked into it because they don't know how to _create_ stuff on web, just consume it. HN is full of people who can create web-based stuff, so I was curious to see if there were any neat experiments people had done.
Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?
#13I wrote Professional XMPP Programming with JavaScript and jQuery ( http://professionalxmpp.com ), which is a book about developing XMPP applications (and not just chat related) using the Strophe.js ( http://strophe.im/strophejs ) library. There are a few books about the XMPP protocol itself, but I really wanted to see something that was more about how to get things done with it than schema descriptions. The book has…
I have that book on my shelf! Loved it, was a great resource when trying to figure out XMPP and Strophe.js.
Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?
#14http://roberthackerbooks.com/
Book develops my thinking on a business model for high growth companies. Concepts are illustrated in part by my experience building a billion dollar company.
Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?
#15Agile/Kanban without the Bullshit For folks who have suffered under various Agile, Kanban, and other improvement regimes and know that it's not supposed to be like this. I'm about 80% of the way through the first draft. I have a few prominent community members that are going to review (and recommend, if they like it) but it's more of a personal statement than a commercial venture. It's a topic I have a lot of experie…
What are the best current resources for self-publishing and the epub maze?
Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?
#16I co-authored a chapter in "Beautiful Teams" at the urging of a friend, who was coordinating the project.
Writing a chapter is quite a bit of work, so a book must be quite an undertaking. I feel that it's worth doing, though. Writing anything -- a design spec, an email, a story from your past, etc -- forces you to coalesce and clarify thoughts that have floating around your brain. I gained new perspective on events that I thought I had a complete handle on years earlier.
Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?
#17I write books for a living. Mostly fiction:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...
Which is not to say that I haven't written technical books, back in the day:
http://www.amazon.com/Web-Architects-Handbook-Charles-Stross...
I'm not self-published -- I've got Ace (aka part of Penguin USA), Orbit (aka Hachette) and Tor (aka Holtzbrinck) as my publishers.
Yes, I do this for a day job.
Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?
#18A Thesis and a Dissertation, do those count?
Sure - but I'm mostly curious to learn what kinds of experiences good hackers have had in trying to get their ideas out there. The publishing industry just seems terribly archaic, and most people trying to write books are locked into it because they don't know how to _create_ stuff on web, just consume it. HN is full of people who can create web-based stuff, so I was curious to see if there were any neat experiments…
a) There are about a dozen different industries flying in loose formation and termed "publishing" -- academic press is not like mass market fiction press, or newspapers, or magazines, or self-improvement books or textbooks. The web is the latest and most rapidly changing delivery vehicle but it crosses all of these lines. Beware of thinking of "the web" as a publishing sector; rather, it's a mechanism for delivering the content to the reader's eyeballs, much like offset-litho printing.
b) Today's publishing industry runs on the set of business practices that didn't cause someone [else] to go bust at some point over the past 150 years. It may look archaic and weird, but it's that way for a whole bunch of reasons that looked good at some time.
More here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...
Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?
#19I wrote a memoir that's mostly about education, leading up to the creation of Facebook.
http://www.amazon.com/Authoritas-Students-Admissions-Foundin...
It's self-published through my company, Think Computer Corporation, under the Think Press label.
The web-based version contains links on a page-by-page basis to primary source documents and is available free here:
http://www.aarongreenspan.com/authoritas.html
In case you're curious, my response to Peter Cooper's Amazon.com comment is here:
Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?
#20I've self-published an ebook & screencast series on math (http://betterexplained.com/articles/math-betterexplained-ebo...) based on my blog content.
I've written more about the numbers and process here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870015
The parent thread by Peter Cooper is very interesting too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=869106