Writing a book about Maatkit
I’ve decided to start writing a book about Maatkit. The working title is Using Maatkit. The goal is to provide another angle onto the tools; the docs are quite good in my opinion, but they only say what the tools do. The book will tell you how to use the toolkit to accomplish tasks.
I have no clue when it’ll be done. There is no schedule. At the current rate, it’ll take a while. I posted an outline to the Maatkit mailing list.
I have a few goals for the project. I want it to be printable-quality material (with an index and professional copyediting, which I have already figured out will cost me a pretty penny), but I also want to be able to update it quickly. I’ve had a number of discussions about this idea over the last year with folks in the publishing business, and although there’s potential for printing and selling it like a normal book, or doing a print-on-demand model, I think I’d like to take a slightly different approach.
Here’s what I think I’m going to do for the time being: You’d be able to buy it as a PDF online. After I release a new edition, I’ll post the old edition online for free, along with the TOC and some front matter, etc from the new edition.
My initial thought is that this would be a one-person perpetual license. I might also consider a company-wide license. Future editions would be a free upgrade. I’m not set on that path, though.
I wouldn’t encrypt the PDF; I’d just trust buyers with the honor system. I take it as a given that there’s no way to prevent unauthorized redistribution of the book. It did not take long for High Performance MySQL to be downloadable from all sorts of unethical sites as a PDF and in .chm format, so I think it’s futile to fight it.
On another note, I’m having fun with the project so far, and falling in love with LaTeX all over again. It is such a joy to work with after writing a huge book in a word processor without real version control.
Cool
Arjen Lentz
5 Jun 09 at 12:07 am
Do you have any plans to eventually license the book with something like the GNU FDL or some kind of CC license? Maybe after you release it for download on the website you could make the change. Just a thought; I know you need to cover your expenses (though your time will probably never be covered by what you make off the book).
Any idea who would be the publisher?
Nathaniel
5 Jun 09 at 12:17 am
Hi Baron,
great idea! It’s bound to be quite an effort, and I hope your effort will be rewarded financially one way or the other.
kind regards and good luck
Roland.
Roland Bouman
5 Jun 09 at 3:32 am
Nathaniel, I’m planning to self-publish at this point. I don’t think this book would really be a big success for any publisher with the model I’d like to use.
Xaprb
5 Jun 09 at 8:04 am
Great!
Another idea: Have you thought about making available an early beta pdf for readers, like the Pragmatic Bookshelf?
I have some friends who got “Programming Erlang” that way and they were very happy about it (I was a late adopter and got the paperback :)), and apparently it’s good feedback for the author too.
Fernando I par
5 Jun 09 at 8:05 am
Good idea. I used Maatkit tooks for a UTF8 conversion and some of the steps and procedures were nontrivial.
Bryan
5 Jun 09 at 8:48 am
Bryan, would you mind posting your experiences to the Maatkit mailing list? I think a lot of people could benefit.
Xaprb
5 Jun 09 at 10:01 am
Fernando, I did think about an early beta, thanks for the encouragement!
Xaprb
5 Jun 09 at 10:01 am
I looked into using lulu for this previously; there some overhead, but istr you can make both free pdf versions available and print on demand available for those who want it. (Of course there are others that do this kind of work). It might be worth looking into.
Another idea might be to make it a wiki-book, which allow you to have others help out in writing various pieces of the book while providing open access to everyone. Granted the tools to convert wiki entries to other formats generally suck, which might make it hard to monetize, but it’s another potential avenue.
Robert Treat
5 Jun 09 at 10:58 am
[...] Baron Schwartz’s Maatkit, for example. Baron announced this week that he is writing a book about Maatkit, and also seeking input for a new tool to verify MySQL [...]
Log Buffer #149: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs | Pythian Group Blog
5 Jun 09 at 12:49 pm
Yea!! Ryan Lowe was just at the SF MySQL meetup giving a LOT of dense info on maatkit. Unfortunately no examples of writing a module, but now I see it’ll be in the book. I love maatkit and it turns out I’ve barely scratched the surface.
erin oneill
5 Jun 09 at 1:54 pm
Awesome! I can’t wait. I’d be willing to help with proof-reading and any other peripheral stuff you can think of.
Gil
5 Jun 09 at 3:00 pm
Excellent idea.
From what I hear, technical writers are barely paid relative to the effort they put in to do the work. Which is mind blowing considering how expensive technical books are.
If more authors would come up w/ innovative models like yours and we had a proper e-book reader w/o such crushing DRM, I’m sure a lot more books would be bought and read and more money would reach the pockets of the authors, who deserve the bulk for their hard work.
Bravo Baron.
Joe Devon
7 Jun 09 at 4:30 pm