My django book project just got cancelled by the pragmatic programmers. For a very good and valid reason: it just took too much time and effort to get the chapters completed. Most of that time was spend in editing chapters into a form that fit the pragmatic programmer style.
My main writing problem: getting side-tracked with details. I just try to cram too much into the book. When I can explain something that’s marginally related to the real subject of a sentence/paragraph/chapter, I will. And, boom, another paragraph gets too hard to understand.
The current result? I’ve got 140 pages out of an estimated 250. That’s a hefty pile of paper when I print it out. I’ve had colleagues look in awe :-) The text is not at the pragprog quality level, but I’d say that a lot is quite OK.
So… what now? I don’t know yet. I don’t want the effort to go to waste. I might copy stuff into my blog. I might continue writing by myself. Self-publish.
For that, one of the first things I’m doing is converting my text from pragprog’s format to either LaTeX or restructured text. And changing all those Ugly Headers With Title Case to regular sentence case :-)
But first I’m taking some time off. Time to read a book. Time to fix up the house after last summer’s move.
Wow, I certainly put in a massive amount of time… But also my editor and my co-author. Thanks a lot for their effort!
This might take some getting used to.
My name is Reinout van Rees and I work a lot with Python (programming language) and Django (website framework). I live in The Netherlands and I'm happily married to Annie van Rees-Kooiman.
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