Jim Minatel's Wrox Book Editor Blog ASP.NET, XML, CSS, Ajax, PHP

Scott Guthrie's NerdDinner Chapter from Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 released

For the ASP.NET developer who is under a rock and hasn't seen Hanselman blog it, or ScottGu blog it, or Hanselman tweet it, or the 1001 retweets, here's the big news: Scott Guthrie has written a 184 page chapter walking you start to finish through your first ASP.NET MVC application: NerdDinner. The chapter is part of the upcoming Wrox book Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0written by Rob Conery, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, and Scott Guthrie.

AND the Scotts, Rob, Phil and Wrox has released this chapter under the Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives license. That's right. It's yours. It's free.

You can get the chapter from Wrox at http://tinyurl.com/aspnetmvc and read more about the book (maybe buy a copy or ten to prove giving away this chapter was a genius idea).

Silly Survey

I just filled out a book publishing industry magazine survey for their best publishing company to work for survey. I was amused by the "what department do you work in" question that had these options for answers:

• Customer Service/Care/Support

• Development/Fundraising
• Finance/Accounting
• Human Resources
• Information Technology
• Legal
• Marketing/Advertising
• Maintenance/Operations
• Production
• Research & Development
• Other (please specify) 

  Uh, in book publishing, Editorial shouldn't have to fall under "Other."

Too many cooks, too many iterations

I've got a couple of projects going on right now that really have me reconsidering what have become recently accepted publishing facts:

• New "Fact 1": We are better than thee - large collections of authors writing as a group are better than a single talented individual.

That's funny. Because Wrox customers have been telling us the opposite for 5 years, and I suspect they told previous Wrox editors that earlier too. My experience right now watching the opinions 100 reviewers offer on a project tells me there's a limit to how many authors or reviewers opinions can be usefully integrated into 1 book.

And actually this reminds me of my early days in publishing as a college textbook development editor. One of my main responsibilities in that job was to collect reviews from 10-15 professors who were candidates to adopt the book for their class. 2-3 similar comments from that 10-15 person pool on anything was considered a consensus and typically all the "consensus" did was to dull the edges on anything new or different versus the 5 textbooks the pool represented as current users, effectively killing most new opinions and teaching methods. I won't say there's a directly equal result now but the similar pulls in opposite directions from multiple reviews in any large pool are eery.

It also reminds me of a story Richard Feynman told in Surely You're Joking, Mr Feymanin the chapter titled "Judging Books by Their Covers." he recounts how he ended up on a state textbook selection committee for math texts. Here, one of the world's smartest scientists of any type labored over the dozens of books publishers sent him to evaluate, some of the other members on the committee choosing a book ranked and voted for a book that was actually nothing but blank pages between covers. And yet, the votes those people made for other books still counted as much as Mr. Feyman's vote, although clearly their "opinion" of the blank book should have disqualified them. Wouldn't the opinion of 1, maybe 2, really smart authors or editors be much better than a diluted book-by-committee?

• New Fact #2: Book publishing should be more like modern software development, agile and iterated, not a waterfall process..

For me, that idea breaks down in a couple of places. One, have you ever seen a software project run on schedule? Does moving to an agile or iterative development model ever help schedules or does it just mean that developers have an unlimited number of iterations to tweak? It can't be that way in books (and I'm not sure it should be that way in software). There comes a day when done needs to be done (paraphrasing Partick Cauldwell in Wrox's own Code Leader). Paper is the "done" version of most books today. Until that changes, trying to adapt a process that only marginally works when there can be 1.0, 1.01, 1.02, 1.1, etc releases electronically to something that's really physically restrained to 1 release, a printed book, is not a great idea.

So I know these are contrary opinions, but they've really got me thinking lately.

Why authors (and editors) should participate in forums

This happens so frequently that it's commonplace. But I just saw a picture perfect example of it I had to share. I witnessed this exchange about a book in a forum recently:

• Reader: I bought this book because someone important recommended it but the coverage of the 1 topic I care about was lame. The authors are awful people.
• Author: Hey sorry you were disappointed. The book is huge as is and that topic isn't core to the topic so we didn't cover it much.
• Reader: [Edits out previous comment about the author's intelligence]: You know I've been reading the book more and the rest of it very good. It covers everything I need. Sorry and thanks.

Even though I've obscured the details, this is a very real thread. And it illustrates so many truths:

• We we published Naked Conversations, I talked with Shel and Robert a lot about how blogging (the primary topic of the book) wasn't the be-all end-all and that the main point was participation and communication. Whatever tool people are using for those is where you need to be: blogs, forums, whatever. Blogs, twitter, friendfeed, facebook, and so on are all the rage for this, but don't forget "tired" applications like forums where tens of millions of typical readers and customers share their thoughts daily
• It's so easy to turn an unhappy customer into a fan? What book do you think the reader above is going to recommend now when someone asks him? When the author's next book comes out, if he needs the topic what book do you think this reader will buy?
• For forums that display post view counts (like we do on p2p.wrox.com) look and see how many thousands of views a typical post like this gets. Think the same questions: all those thousands of people reading this post, what book, what author will they recommend next?
• Editors: 99% of reader comments like this are just as easy for you to answer just as well as the author did. Same set of questions but even bigger scope: simply, at the end of the day are your readers evangelists for your books, authors, and the brand? Or have you ignored their complaints and left them as billboards for 1-800-hate-you for your books for 1000s of potential readers to see?
• And it's also hard to fault the reader here for their initial frustrated post: I just dropped $50 on a book and the first topic I wanted to learn wasn't deep enough. I could have bought a gallon of gas and a dollar menu burger with that $50 and learned more. Arrgh. I'm sure the reader would have eventually found something to like in the book but the polite author response got him there faster. and now the reader sees the author as a person, not just a distant face on a cover.

As editors, I'll admit we've probably put too much emphasis on blogging and other personal author platforms (soap boxes) the last 24 months and not enough emphasis on authors who do a good job participating with readers where the readers are. And at times, even the editors put too much time into building their own soap boxes and not enough time in the forums and blog comments where their readers are. Speaking of which, I have a forum to get to!

Three Top Tools for Text

In the spirit of Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List and Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror "Support Your Favorite Small Software Vendor" here's Jim's much less prominent list of great text tools worth paying for. This short list of tools has been priceless to me in the production of our Wrox Chapters On Demand project and also the new Wrox First wikis.

For Chapters on Demand, my biggest direct task was creating the web descriptions for the initial launch of 1700+ chapters. For the chapter descriptions, the team decided on using each chapter's introduction. We had a production assistant who delivered to me a single Word file for each book with all of that book's chapter introduction.

The first tool I needed was something to produce cleaner HTML for more than 80 books worth of introductions. The tool I chose for that was Zapadoo's Word Cleaner (http://www.zapadoo.com/). Word Cleaner's strengths for me are:

1. Clean HTML with a choice of inline CSS, CSS in a separate file, or no CSS.
2. A great template system for setting up different automatic conversions. Each template can contain a series of search and replace commands to give you even more power over the finished HTML it produces. Individual templates can contain as many search and replaces as you want and you can also chain templates together.
3. Batch processing. Once I had a template set up doing all the replacements I needed, it did all 80+ conversions in under a minute.
4. Regular expression search and replace.
5. A 30 day free trial. This was essential for me as I really needed a little time to test the tool to make sure I could get what I needed out of it.

All in all a very nice tool at a very affordable price of $99 US. I really recommend this for anyone who has Word documents and needs HTML from them. Thanks to the easy to set up multiple conversion templates, Word Cleaner is also getting a workout as my tool of choice for preparing Word chapters for use in the Wrox First wikis.

The next step in the process was to add each book's ISBN into the chapter description HTML files with the chapter number. The combination of book ISBN and chapter number are how I found each description and identified which chapter SKU it's going to get later. While it's possible that Word Cleaner's reg ex replacements included a filename insertion command, I couldn't find it so rather than battling it, I just found another inexpensive search and replace reg ex tool from Funduc Software (http://www.funduc.com/) creating titled "Search and Replace." It's highlights for me:

1. Batch processing capabilities
2. saving defined replacements
3. filename insertion command.

At only $25, Search and Replace was a no brainer tool choice for me. It saved me untold hours I might have spent sorting through the search and replace with a less sophisticated tool. And don't take my word for it, I first found Funduc and Search and Replace on Hanselman's Ultimate Tools List.

From there, the last thing I needed to do to get the HTML I needed was replace the placeholder ISBN and chapter number combination with the actual SKU for each chapter. The SKU is the identifier (instead of a typical book ISBN) we are using for each individual chapter. The SKU is what's going to allow our internal automated catalog system to read by batches of HTML files and drop each description into the right place in the catalog. My tool for this step is, SadMan Software's XChange (http://www.sadmansoftware.com/xchange/). The features here that got the job done for me were:

1. Batch list processing across multiple files. I start with a list of SKUs by ISBN and chapter in an Excel file and create a text file from Excel with a list of 1700 search a replaces replacing each chapter/sku combination with the right sku. Xchange did all 1700 search and replaces across all 80+ book files in under a minute.

All three of these tools shared several common traits:

1. Free trial periods, which I needed to test each one.
2. Low cost. At $25-$100 for these, it's really easy to justify buying any of them.

After those text tools, I have one more bonus recommendation not for text and HTML but for PDF. A lot of the work we've been doing revolves around PDFs. The answer to a question we get over and over in the Wrox p2p.wrox.com forums "how do I create PDFs in .NET" for us has been Active PDF ToolKit (http://www.activepdf.com/products/serverproducts/Toolkit/index.cfm). When I first recommended it, we were just using it to add the customer-specific watermarks to the footer of each Wrox Blox we sell. It's a programmer's toolkit that let us program the various bits of data we want watermarked in each output PDF. From there, we've also extended it to automate the creation of the Chapter on Demand PDFs we sell, making the changes to each print chapter PDF to make them more suitable for sale individually. Like the previously mentioned text products, it has a free trial license available, which was a real necessity so our programmer could test it before we made the valuable $900 licensing investment. (Prices range from $99-899 depending on your license needs and there are discounts for multiple server licenses.)

Update on Wrox Hiring Acquisitions Editor

Wiley has officially posted the open position we're hiring for. Yes, it's official, we really do need a new editor. If you know someone who might be interested, they need to apply soon.

Wrox looking for an editor

We're looking for another acquisitions editor here. If we find the right person, they'd work primarily on Wrox books although we all work on a few Wiley titles too. We're looking for someone with at least some publishing experience related to acquisitions. The AE role here is responsible for finding good authors, ideas, topics, evaluating proposals, preparing materials for internal approval. The AE also negotiates the author contract and manages the author schedule and relationship. We're looking for someone with good professional networking skills, who can build relationships with authors who'll want to work with us again and again and who'll refer their trusted colleagues. The AE has a large business management responsibility, needing to plan a year's worth of books to hit a budget.

This AE would primarily work on ASP.NET, maybe some JavaScript, emerging programming topics, open source .NET development. The AE doesn't need to be a programmer (there's no programming involved in being an acq ed) but it helps to enjoy talking and communicating with programmers. Someone who enjoys social networking on facebook, twitter, building our community on the forums at p2p.wrox.com would be a plus. AEs typically attend a couple of professional programmer conferences a year.

We probably need someone who would work in our Indianapolis office although Hoboken NJ and SF CA are also possibilities. We're not looking for telecommuters or contractors, sorry.

If you know anyone, send them my way.

Wrox Chapters on Demand: Buy PDFs of individual Wrox book chapters

Wrox Chapters on Demand is our new system to let programmers buy individual chapters from Wrox books. Launched yesterday with 47 Wrox books and approximately 900 individual chapters, programmers can now buy PDFs of just the chapters they need. Over the next week or two, we have another 37 books and 800 chapters staged and ready to roll out. Going forward, we'll make almost every Wrox book available by the chapter in Chapters on Demand as soon as the book is published, or even before print book availability in stores.

Right now, Wrox Chapters on Demand are available for purchase only from Wrox.com. We sell most chapters for $4.99 (US) although a handful of mega-chapters sell for $6.99 and $9.99. Every book also has 1 chapter available for free, typically chapter 1. With Wrox Beginning books in the program we also make the Answers Appendix available for free. And there are a handful of chapters and appendixes that are so short we're giving them away free too. Free chapters are sent by email, purchased chapters come from a secure download.

Wrox Chapters on Demand are sold as PDFs, with no DRM other than trust, subject to our terms of use. Like the Wrox Blox we launched last fall, chapters you buy are watermarked with your name and email address at the bottom of each page.

For any book available in Chapters on Demand, like Professional Visual Studio Extensibility by Keyvan Nayyeri the book's page at wrox.com features a new navigation tab for Chapters on Demand like you see here. There's a detailed description for each chapter so you know what you get before you buy it. This page shows just the first 2 lines of each chapter description, but the "more" link expands the description to show you the complete introduction from each chapter.

To see which books are available as Chapters on Demand at Wrox, look in any book list on the site like All Titles or ASP.NET. Books available as Chapters on Demand will have an additional Chapters on Demand link after their listing in the table.

   

Authors, we hope you like this great new way to get your expertise to programmers. If you have questions, please join in the private discussion in the Wrox author forum at p2p.wrox.com, ask me, or ask your editor.

Wrox First: Get Wrox Book's While They're Being Written

Yesterday we made publicly available our first Wrox First wiki, for the book Professional Microsoft Windows Embedded CE 6.0. The Wrox First wikis give programmers early access to Wrox books while they're still being written. In the case of Samuel Phung's Professional Microsoft Windows Embedded CE 6.0 book, so far we've posted 2 draft chapters and we'll post more chapters as they come in.

Every draft chapter will be posted and members can make comments and suggestions about each chapter. And then once the chapters have been reviewed and edited, we'll post the 2nd drafts as well. And members can comment on those too. And when the manuscript is final and at the printer, we'll post that again.

We've got several more books we plan to make available as Wrox First wikis in the near future, hopefully with the Silverlight 2.0 Programmer's Reference next up. We're still waiting for a useful beta or CTP of Silverlight 2.0 for the authors to make any real progress on that manuscript, but once we get some chapters based off of a beta that would be of use to programmers, we'll start posting those chapters too.

Membership is a bargain. Joining costs just a 1 time payment of $19.99 (US) per book. For programmers who need early access to must have content, that's a steal. The $19.99 payment gets members access to the whole book through all the writing stages, and continuing access to the final content in the wiki for 1 year after the book has published.

For authors, it's a great way to get reader feedback on your books before they're published. And for members who really want to be involved and make an impact, it's a way to make your mark on a book.

Authors, if you are interested in seeing your book in this program, let me or your Wrox editor know. We're going to be very selective about this with some criteria including:

• You have to be willing to read and respond to reader comments on the wiki ;)
• Your book has to be in the early writing stages, with you just getting started writing or only a few chapters in
• The book should be on a hot, coming topic, something there aren't already other books on.

Alexei's Wrox Bookshelf

Alexei is one smart and diligent guy. If you make a mistake in your book and Alexei has it, he will find it. Thanks for sending me the Wrox bookshelf photo Alexei, it's a nice one for the growing collection.

Some of the others are:

• Brian Squibb
• Robert Searing
• Adam Kahtava
• Spike Xavier