The book is done now, right? What’s next?

Don’t tell my wife this, but a book is never done.

Right now I’m proofreading the printed copy. I proofread PDF after PDF during production, but some problems will always slip through and make it to paper. I’m finding quite a few little mistakes. For example, at one point we refer to TPC as TCP three times in a row. Oops.

These problems will be corrected in the next printing. Please notify me if you find any errors yourself, and I’ll add them to the list of things to fix! Also let me know if you find things that should just be “fixed” in general. For example, the layout and page-breaking on pages 364 and 365 is totally confusing — it’s hard to tell which figures are associated with which text.

I’m not offering rewards like Donald Knuth, sorry…

I will place a list of errata on the official …

My post on what it’s like to write a technical book was a stream-of-consciousness look at the process of writing High Performance MySQL, Second Edition. I got a lot of responses from it and learned some neat things I wouldn’t have learned if I hadn’t written the post. I also got a lot of questions, and my editor wrote a response too. I want to follow up on these things.

Was I fair, balanced and honest?

I really intended to write the post as just “here’s what it’s like, just so you’re prepared.” But at some point I got really deep into it and lost my context. That’s when I started to write about the things that didn’t go so smoothly with the publisher, …

As you probably know, I recently finished writing a book with a few co-authors. I kept notes along the way and wanted to describe the process for those who are thinking about writing a book, too.

Update: see the followup post for more of the story, including my editor’s responses.

I think it’s important to be objective; my purpose here is to help prospective authors get a feeling of what it’s like, and it’s not all good (but I’d encourage people to do it anyway). Hopefully I won’t come off as sounding peeved at anyone or like I’m trying to put people down. I’ll have a lot to say about what went right and wrong, and how it helped and hindered the process.

Please excuse the rambling nature of this post. I’d love to …

The MySQL User Guide is worth looking at. Its not the reference manual (which is excellent - kudos to our Documentation Team). Its target audience are users that are new to databases or users that are new to MySQL in general.

What’s really interesting about the MySQL User Guide is that you can help shape it. You, the community, can participate in writing it!

I for one, know that this is the easiest way you can start contributing to any open source project. Documenting it. Soon, you will realise that you’ve become an expert (writing documentation, or giving training, will always keep you sharp). Some move on to then delving in coding, some go on being consultants, and some end up being hired by the company that sponsors …

A lot of people have repeatedly asked me why I’ve not mentioned my thoughts on the Sun-MySQL acquisition (and this blog post, clearly comes almost a month later). I’ve just been pre-occupied and have not had the time to come up with a lengthy blog post. I can however, recommend the following video, created by Mike Lischke, of MySQL Workbench fame.

Naturally, you should also read the Q&A Session with Marten Mickos, that was mostly whipped up almost immediately after the acquisition. Editorial kudos on that one goes to Lenz Grimmer, Steve Curry, and Zack Urlocker. I pretty much had those thoughts that Marten answered really …

Whew! I just finished a marathon of revisions. It's been a while since I posted about our progress, so here's an update for the curious readers.

I have two talks in the coming few weeks, that I’m still madly writing. I’ve come to the realisation that writing talks, really does take a lot of time (when you have a deadline). Especially, if you’re doing it my style - everytime I write a slide, and find something missing in the Wiki, I go ahead and fix it. So its not actually talk writing I’m doing, but expansion of our online documentation, and keeping it in check. That takes time.

• Enhancing Competitiveness Through Technology - I’m giving this talk at the Malaysian Employers Federation (MEF) Annual Conference 2007. Their conference is themed around “Enhancing Competitiveness Through Technology & Law Reforms ? The Next 50 Years” and is on the 19-20 November 2007, at the KL Convention Centre. My talk is on the 20th, as I’ll be on a plane on the 19th. This is targeted at CEO/manager level, so is lighter on tech-related content, but more …

I've been trying to circle back and clean up things I left for later in several chapters of High Performance MySQL, second edition. This includes a lot of material in chapter 4, Schema Optimization and Indexing. At some point I'll write more about the process of writing this book, and what we've done well and what we've learned to do better, but for right now I wanted to complete the picture of what material we have on schema, index, and query optimization. The last two chapters I've written about (Query Performance Optimization and Advanced MySQL Features) have generated lots of feed back along the lines …

I mentioned earlier that I'd blog about progress on the book as we go. It's not only progress on the book itself -- I want to write about the process of writing, because I think it's very interesting and relevant to software engineering. I'm finding a lot of the work in writing a book comes from some of the same things that make software hard: coordinating work, deciding what should go where, and so on.

MySQL MiniConf at linux.conf.au 2007
This implies I’m coming to linux.conf.au 2007 in Sydney next January. What’s more is that during the MiniConfs, we’ve got one for MySQL. Its on January 15th, and we’ve just put out the call for participation/papers. You have about eight (8) days left to submit a paper. So submit your tales of deployment, conference presentations, and I believe we’re even willing to accept “hand’s on” hacking sessions (ala what happened at MySQL Camp). Keep the wiki page handy, and submit goodies to mysql-miniconf[AT]mysql[dot]com.

Interview with Paddy Sreenivasan
Yes, Engineering Lead at Zmanda, they’re big on AMANDA and now …