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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?

#161

Post by Murkin »

swyx wrote: post #125
Murkin wrote: post #88

Very different experience for me. Wrote a book about Redux ( https://leanpub.com/redux-book ) brought about $15K for 4 months of work. (Granted, did no marketing at all) It always feels strange to say "I wrote a book" and it never seemed to really impress tech people or cause an inflow of consulting work. But it is very fun and you get to really get into the tech (other projects, sources, blogs, testing ideas). Prob…

15k is pretty good for no marketing! i feel that self published book authors should all have a "marketing partner" since they all seem so shy about marketing

If we knew any good partner, would happily split revenue for their work.

Not sure what is the best place to find such companies/individuals

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#162

Post by mixmastamyk »

st1x7 wrote: post #101
alextheparrot wrote: post #3

Martin deserves every penny of his hard-work on Designing Data Intensive Applications. Experienced engineers can easily use the book as a reference and you can give the book to smart junior engineers to give them a great foundation. Honestly, the best technical book I’ve ever owned.

Can someone expand on why the book is so good? I found it very unremarkable but it's recommended so much around here that I suspect that I've missed something important.

Unremarkable if you're in that field with experience. If you're one of the majority of developers working around the edges or new to the subject it is quite enlightening.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#163

Post by dredmorbius »

jcranmer wrote: post #115
dredmorbius wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But the skill remains in competition with all other skills --- some specialisation or specialisations must shrink for another to grow. With a century of universal compulsory education, US adult literacy rates have difficulty cracking 91%.[1] That's about 10 million people with no effective English literacy. (Some are literate in other languages.) Some other industrialised countries see similar results, though m…

> With a century of universal compulsory education, US adult literacy rates have difficulty cracking 91%.[1] That's about 10 million people with no effective English literacy. (Some are literate in other languages.) Some other industrialised countries see similar results, though most fall at 98% or higher by UNESCO rankings.[2] I drilled into the literacy reports cited by [1], eventually landing at [3]. From those re…

Just to note, I realised much of this when composing and citing my reply above. US NCES and UNESCO literacy metrics and criteria do seem to differ pretty materially.

There are other evidences of persistent barriers to skills and rationality attainment though, with fairly strong evidence.

US high school graduation rates reached a pretty firm plateau in about 1950, having risen from six percent in 1900. Much of the ballyhoo over secondary education (test scores vs. graduation rates) has involved trading one against the other, though improvements in fundamental living standards for the poorest (well mother/baby care, nutrition, housing, environmental contaminants most especially heavy metals, reduced general precarity) have also contributed greatly, as has equality of access. All of these being before pedagogical factors are considered --- raiseing the floor is the most cost-effective way of raising numerous population averages.

Hiher-education attainment similarly shows some resistance to expansion, as well as questions regarding comparability over time. Bachellors, Masters, and PhD inflation seem likely. There are also cases where standards seem to have tightened somewhat: there was a biography of a 19th century American who was admitted to the bar in a Southern state on the basis of a brief interview, but who declined the practived on account of the obviously lax standards evidenced. (Ran across recently via Wikipedia, though the details escape me.)

Back to literacy, the US seems to struggle to achieve ~95% at a minimum, the number I'd initially written above, though by its own measure (assuming all those unable to participate in the assessment are illiterate) as low as 91%.

The UNESCO values strike me as somewhat suspiciously high. I'm not sure that's warranted suspicion, but it suggests investigating methods more deeply.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#164

Post by papaf »

st1x7 wrote: post #101
alextheparrot wrote: post #3

Martin deserves every penny of his hard-work on Designing Data Intensive Applications. Experienced engineers can easily use the book as a reference and you can give the book to smart junior engineers to give them a great foundation. Honestly, the best technical book I’ve ever owned.

Can someone expand on why the book is so good? I found it very unremarkable but it's recommended so much around here that I suspect that I've missed something important.

Can someone expand on why the book is so good?

Its a practical overview of a difficult and modern topic. That in itself would make the book good, but for me, it is that the book goes deeper into the research and algorithms than most O'Reilly books -- but it does this without becoming a Science textbook.

It is easy to tell the people working in big data that haven't read the book, just from the mistakes they make.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#165

Post by dredmorbius »

Retric wrote: post #156
dredmorbius wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you measure or disprove your hypothesis? Compared to what or when?

20, 50, and 100 years too seem like a reasonable point of comparison. One simple approach is hand people old objective tests for subjects like math under the original rules. If people where simply becoming more competent in all areas then average scores should be higher today, but that’s not what happens. Measuring complexity more specifically is probably easiest done by using equivalent jobs and compare how long eac…

Maths is, like literacy, a fundamental skill, not a specialty.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#166

Post by libraryofbabel »

st1x7 wrote: post #101
alextheparrot wrote: post #3

Martin deserves every penny of his hard-work on Designing Data Intensive Applications. Experienced engineers can easily use the book as a reference and you can give the book to smart junior engineers to give them a great foundation. Honestly, the best technical book I’ve ever owned.

Can someone expand on why the book is so good? I found it very unremarkable but it's recommended so much around here that I suspect that I've missed something important.

Did you find it unremarkable because you already know the material, or because the material isn't relevant to what you do?

Anyway, some reasons:

* Draws together a wealth of material on databases and distributed systems that wasn't explained in a systematic, accessible way anywhere else. It provides a map to someone coming to this hard-to-navigate area for the first time.

* Great balance between being conversant with the academic research (without being too abstract) and being practically applicable (without being too tied to details of particular technologies)

* Shows underlying unity and concepts of very different data technologies, e.g. why classic relational database write-ahead logs and replication are very similar to streaming platforms like Kafka

* Subjective, but it is very clear, accessible, and well-written. This is very very hard to do and quite rare in technical books.

It's my favorite technical book of the decade and my first recommendation to anyone who asks me how to really "level up" as a senior engineer.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#167

Post by mooreds »

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 wrote a book, too (career advice for new devs). I had previously written a technical ebook (about Cordova) and wanted to write something that had a longer lifespan, but was still focused on developers. Writing a technical book was great, but, like you said, it became outdated very easily.

That said, if you want to anchor yourself as an expert in a space, I can't think of a better way to do it than to write a book. This is because it will force you to learn the topic very well (I remember spending an hour testing out something so I could write one sentence accurately) and because you can say "oh yes, I wrote a book on that" which gives you a lot of credibility.

I think it was totally worth writing the less technical book too. It makes you dig into thoughts and ideas in a much deeper way than blog posts or presentations.

It also opens up some doors in terms of presentations and speaking, if that's of interest. My book wasn't on a technical topic, but if you write one, I could definitely see that leading to some consulting.

I think the best way to write a book is to blog it first, then assemble the pieces (adding in more). This lets you do a number of things:

* you can outline the topic as a series of posts. If you can't do this, don't write a non-fiction book.

* you can see if you like the topic 5-10 posts in. If you do, then you have the bones of a book. If you don't, why would you commit to a full length book?

* you can build an audience. I didn't have a large audience, but had a list of 200ish people I could market the book to. And again, if you blog 5-10 times and no one is interested, they probably won't be interested in a book either.

* you can easily turn it into an ebook (using a tool like leanpub) if you determine you want to self publish. If you work with a traditional publisher, you can still pull and revise the blog posts.

Since the book was just released in August, I have no idea of the financial success. Like the author, I'm not looking to have this be a huge piece of my income stream. If I can earn out my advance, I'll be happy.

Here's the book URL if you want to check it out: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/the-book/

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#168

Post by thewebcount »

It's really stunning to see the percentage take from writing a book vs. putting something on the app store. People complain about Google and Apple taking 30%, but for these books, they're taking 75% for electronic books and 90% for print! 30% doesn't sound so bad to me compared to that. (I realize for print their costs are higher, but still - 90%?)

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#169

Post by yesenadam »

goostavos wrote: post #120
rllearneratwork wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

another good way to become a little bit "internet famous" is to create and maintain a useful open-source project. IMHO, this is more future proof in the technology space since you can gradually evolve a project but a book can become obsolete if it focuses on a specific technology rather than fundamentals.

Meh, I expected this was true. However, after 6(?) years of maintaining a moderately popular project (~10k stars), it hasn't amounted to much real external value. It has never come up in interviews, it has never led to any job offers, it's mostly just a thing I work on for free which people happen to like. Which is too bad. I want money!

Do tell - what is the project?

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#170

Post by mooreds »

langitbiru wrote: post #140
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.

Yes, I think if you are writing a technical book, it'd be better to focus on a more stable technology. That or plan for a revision or two after the initial release.

And I can tell you, after I finished my book, I didn't want to think about the topic for a month or so. Can't imagine committing to a revision or two.

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