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Writing a book: is it worth it?

martin.kleppmann.com

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Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#131

Post by freedomben »

bluGill wrote: post #104
ahmedalsudani wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you realize who the author of that reply is. There’s nothing HN typical about him :)

I don't know either. His history shows some extensive knowledge about the types of things I'd expect readers of hacker news to know. Or course there are a lot of beginners, but the goal is to discuss things people like him are interested in. I aspire to write posts as helpful and detailed as his comment history shows.

He's got some creds: http://www.brendangregg.com/

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#132

Post by mritchie712 »

aliceryhl wrote: post #118

I have spent probably thousands of hours writing random responses helping people on forums, just because its the thing that I do to procrastinate. For example, this year I wrote more than 4000 posts on https://users.rust-lang.org/ and 19000 messages on the help channels in a few Discord servers. I'm probably the world expert at spotting the mistake in small snippets of Rust code at this point. I honestly wish I was a…

Just take your last 20 responses and turn them into a post?

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#133

Post by dragonwriter »

kevstev wrote: post #44

He kind of touches upon it, but there is a lot of value in being able to go into an interview and literally being able to say about a topic "I wrote the book on it." It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it. I used to have several guys on my team that had published books- and they were great, and were constantly getting contact…

> It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it.

That would seem to depend on the publisher, and the business arrangement, as to whether it really signals anything (though I suspect that often hiring managers might not know enough to correctly interpret the signal.) Obviously, if the book is a success and widely-known for its technical merit, that's a positive signal, but that's different than just getting a book published.

Even where getting over the hurdles to get a book published signals something, there's a question of whether it signals something relevant to the job you are hiring for. The hurdles of getting a book published (where they exist at all, e.g., outside of what is essentially vanity publishing or a close approximation) aren't particularly similar hurdles to those encountered in most technical jobs even when the book is on a subject close to the job duties.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#134

Post by csours »

Questions for the authors in this thread: If I'm thinking about writing a book, what stepping stones would you recommend? I'm thinking things like should I write a series of blog posts, do tech talks, etc.

What resources were most valuable for you in writing your book?

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#135

Post by azhenley »

mritchie712 wrote: post #132
aliceryhl wrote: post #118

I have spent probably thousands of hours writing random responses helping people on forums, just because its the thing that I do to procrastinate. For example, this year I wrote more than 4000 posts on https://users.rust-lang.org/ and 19000 messages on the help channels in a few Discord servers. I'm probably the world expert at spotting the mistake in small snippets of Rust code at this point. I honestly wish I was a…

Just take your last 20 responses and turn them into a post?

I agree. Or if you want to invest a bit more effort: surely there are patterns of problems you are seeing, each of which could be a blog post.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#136

Post by mrlala »

snypox wrote: post #127
libraryatnight wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We hired this guy who wrote a book on the thing the team he was hired for managed. He was a nightmare. He was just insufferable. People would ask questions and he would suggest they read his book. He would mention his book in every meeting. He would tell people they couldn't do things they'd already done and then back-peddle that it wasn't possible when he'd written his book. It was just a huge drag. He managed to al…

Okay, well I guess that’s a bad experience. I don’t think it invalidates the fact the usually book authors should be somewhat knowledgable - of course it doesn’t automatically mean that all of them is good to work with.

Yes, but... unless you are hiring an absolute EXPERT on that topic and that was the purpose of hiring the person.. I bet that could turn out very poorly.

I mean it's in general like if you hire a PhD into a role that needs to cover a lot of areas, can't be super detailed in anything, and needs to get stuff done as opposed to pure research.. that can turn out poorly.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#137

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

kevstev wrote: post #44

He kind of touches upon it, but there is a lot of value in being able to go into an interview and literally being able to say about a topic "I wrote the book on it." It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it. I used to have several guys on my team that had published books- and they were great, and were constantly getting contact…

> He kind of touches upon it, but there is a lot of value in being able to go into an interview and literally being able to say about a topic "I wrote the book on it."

A lot of it depends on the publisher. If it is for example OReilly, I would be impressed. If it is Packt, I would not be impressed at all. Some publishers do a much better job of screening and providing editorial support and technical reviews so that if an author is published by them, I can have confidence that the author is a subject matter expert. Some publishers are little more than self-publishing and so I would not have confidence that the author was an expert.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#138

Post by ArcMex »

lentinjoseph wrote: post #113

I'm an author of 8 books in Robotics. Here are some of the lessons I have learned from this. Pros 1) Great visibility in the robotics community 2) Started getting good consulting projects 3) Started getting Royalties(Passive income) 4) People start identifying me in conferences 5) Got the invitation to do research in good universities 6) Got good patience which is very useful while working with the robots 7) Knowledg…

How much and what ways did your motivations change from writing book 1 to say book 4? At that point, what's keeping you going the most? By the time you sit down to plan book 8, what's going through your mind especially when you factor in the cons? Thanks.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#139

Post by dredmorbius »

Retric wrote: post #122
dredmorbius wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one presumes a culture with an increasing overall complexity level, then the circumstance is not one of simply obsoleting technologies and skillsets being replaced, but of competition among multiple essential skillsets. Complexity expands to meet all constraint boundaries.

Society is still largely bound by the human intellect. So, I don’t think overall complexity is actually increasing significantly. It’s more a question of how obvious the complexity is.

How would you measure or disprove your hypothesis?

Compared to what or when?

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#140

Post by langitbiru »

lentinjoseph wrote: post #113

I'm an author of 8 books in Robotics. Here are some of the lessons I have learned from this. Pros 1) Great visibility in the robotics community 2) Started getting good consulting projects 3) Started getting Royalties(Passive income) 4) People start identifying me in conferences 5) Got the invitation to do research in good universities 6) Got good patience which is very useful while working with the robots 7) Knowledg…

I can not fathom how you could write 8 books. I have written one book and got it published on Packt. It was a very tiring process.

> 5) Books will outdate very easily (Technical books)

I feel you. I wrote a blockchain programming book. It was becoming outdated soon just after the book was being released. The pace of the blockchain technology is very fast.

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