<story><title>Writing a Programming Book in 2021</title><url>https://jmtirado.net/writing-a-programming-book-in-2021/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>onion2k</author><text>The point about Credibility is interesting. There&amp;#x27;s something about someone who&amp;#x27;s written a technical book that automatically seems impressive just because writing a book is hard, and it&amp;#x27;s easy to assume that the person knows a lot. A long time ago I used to do technical review for a publisher on books about code. It was pretty obvious that some authors didn&amp;#x27;t really know what they were talking about. They knew enough to write something, but there were always &lt;i&gt;a lot&lt;/i&gt; of mistakes.&lt;p&gt;I think many technical books are written to act as a &amp;#x27;proof&amp;#x27; that the author is credible and knows their topic well rather than as an exercise in serving the reader or an attempt to make money. Tech authors know that they&amp;#x27;ve not going to make much. It&amp;#x27;s more an exercise in vanity and improving job prospects. The author doesn&amp;#x27;t really need to be &lt;i&gt;right&lt;/i&gt;. Especially &amp;quot;Beginner&amp;#x27;s guide to X&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Learn X in 24 hours&amp;quot; books, experienced and knowledgable developers won&amp;#x27;t be reading the book to criticise it, and new developers who buy it won&amp;#x27;t know it&amp;#x27;s poorly written, so an author can write any old junk and still claim to be an expert. Consequently I&amp;#x27;ve stopped being particularly impressed by people who have authored books on their resume.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tfp137</author><text>&lt;i&gt;It was pretty obvious that some authors didn&amp;#x27;t really know what they were talking about. They knew enough to write something, but there were always a lot of mistakes.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is why I&amp;#x27;d be very hesitant to self-publish a technical book, even though for fiction I think self-publishing is the right decision 99% of the time. We all make errors, even those of us who do know what we&amp;#x27;re talking about, when you get to the scale of 100+ kilowords. For a novel, a decent copyeditor can fix up the production values well enough; for a technical work, you would hope the publisher assigned some people to check the work.</text></comment>
<story><title>Writing a Programming Book in 2021</title><url>https://jmtirado.net/writing-a-programming-book-in-2021/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>onion2k</author><text>The point about Credibility is interesting. There&amp;#x27;s something about someone who&amp;#x27;s written a technical book that automatically seems impressive just because writing a book is hard, and it&amp;#x27;s easy to assume that the person knows a lot. A long time ago I used to do technical review for a publisher on books about code. It was pretty obvious that some authors didn&amp;#x27;t really know what they were talking about. They knew enough to write something, but there were always &lt;i&gt;a lot&lt;/i&gt; of mistakes.&lt;p&gt;I think many technical books are written to act as a &amp;#x27;proof&amp;#x27; that the author is credible and knows their topic well rather than as an exercise in serving the reader or an attempt to make money. Tech authors know that they&amp;#x27;ve not going to make much. It&amp;#x27;s more an exercise in vanity and improving job prospects. The author doesn&amp;#x27;t really need to be &lt;i&gt;right&lt;/i&gt;. Especially &amp;quot;Beginner&amp;#x27;s guide to X&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Learn X in 24 hours&amp;quot; books, experienced and knowledgable developers won&amp;#x27;t be reading the book to criticise it, and new developers who buy it won&amp;#x27;t know it&amp;#x27;s poorly written, so an author can write any old junk and still claim to be an expert. Consequently I&amp;#x27;ve stopped being particularly impressed by people who have authored books on their resume.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>k__</author><text>I have reviewed so many technical books that were simply bad copies of the documentation. And that by authors who have written 10 books.&lt;p&gt;And the (rather big) publisher didn&amp;#x27;t seem to care at all.</text></comment>