Next article: Friday Q&A 2010-11-19: Creating Classes at Runtime for Fun and Profit
Previous article: Friday Q&A 2010-11-6: Creating Classes at Runtime in Objective-C
Tags: books epub writing
I occasionally get inquiries about the books that I'm involved in, particularly the upcoming Pro Objective-C for Mac and iPhone. I want to briefly summarize the publications that I'm involved with so that there's a single public place that explains it all. I will discuss them in chronological order from when I first started on each one.
iPhone cool projects: this book came out in the summer of 2009 and is currently available from many fine retailers. I wrote chapter 2, which talks about building custom UDP networking protocols.
Pro Objective-C for Mac and iPhone: not currently available. A preview of the first seven chapters is available for purchase from the publisher. I was involved in this project for only a few months in the first half of 2009, before I discovered that the publisher and I were completely incompatible and I left. The extent of my involvement in this book is first drafts of the first five chapters, and the initial overall organization of the book. Although originally due out about a year ago, the release date has slipped several times. Since I am no longer involved with the project in any way, I have no idea as to its actual status or probable release date.
(My own personal recommendation would be not to seek out either of the above books. The percentage of the your money which actually goes to the authors is painfully small. If you like my writing, read my stuff here. If you like it so much that you want to give me money, read the next paragraph.)
The Complete Friday Q&A: Volume One: this is a self-published compilation of all of my Friday Q&A posts through August 2010. I plan to initially release it on iBooks, with other formats (maybe even dead tree) to potentially follow. It is in the final stages of editing now, and its release is imminent, although I can't commit to an exact date.
For those of you interested in my writing, Complete should be out soon and I will certainly announce here when it's available. If you're after Pro Objective-C, then I'm afraid that at this point I know no more than you do about when you'll be able to purchase it.
I'm really glad to see all this interest in my stuff, and I hope that the Complete ebook will live up to your expectations.
Comments:
Miguel: I don't know the international situation for iBooks. I will make it available in as many stores as Apple allows, but I don't know how that will work for Colombia. I will investigate the feasibility of selling the ePub, or possibly PDFs, directly over the internet after I get iBooks set, so in the worst case you can wait for that and get it there.
Once I announce the release here, I would appreciate if you could let me know whether you're able to access it from Colombia or not. Being in the US, I often forget that store availability can be limited in other countries, and I'd like to know either way.
Thanks for this site. I'm still a newbie at Cocoa, but I still like to read more advanced material to expand my knowledge base. Most books stop at only the beginner or intermediate level.
All other books I have not exceed the newbie level. It's like finding a good book for the Core Graphic or Core Text for example it's not easy. Apple documentation doesn't really help. It's often not clear and some time false (thanks for the cut and paste from Mac documentation to iOS). I tried also to ask some technical question on the Apple Developer Forum and most of the time they didn't even answer. Or the answer not really help. They just interested to get information not to give.
If you don't like the condition offer by APress try with an other one.
Ask http://www.pragprog.com/ about theirs conditions for example.
Don't give up because you have a bad experience with one publisher. You have a very good experience on Mac. We need some good advanced books.
I'm tired of reading books that are often a bad plagiarism of Apple documentation.
I have no particular desire to try another publisher. Even if they do better, I just don't see them as adding enough value to the final product to justify their existence, or the money that they take. Even the good publishers seem stuck in the past, seeing the dead-tree version as the product that they offer, and electronic versions as just add-ons.
I think that writing for this blog, and then self-publishing the result, is the best way to go for me. If you have specific topics that you're interested in, feel free to e-mail them to me. I may not take you up on them, but I'm always happy to have more ideas to pull from. Tell me what your idea of interesting advanced topics is, and I'll probably write about at least some of them.
Err BTW, as a brit and a poor speller, I wonder if I can even post this comment ;-)
Comments RSS feed for this page
Add your thoughts, post a comment:
Spam and off-topic posts will be deleted without notice. Culprits may be publicly humiliated at my sole discretion.
I believe Amazon has a decent system for self publishers and I'd be very happy to tote around a copy of the Q&A on my device.