Monday, September 9, 2013

On book writing

For the past month and a half, I've been involved in writing a short technical book that introduces automated acceptance test driven development through an open-source tool, Robot Framework. Now that the drafts have been sent to the publisher, I can introspect on how things happened. Book writing has been challenging and rewarding at the same time. It often happened that I completed my draft revisions way past 1 am and arrived red-eyed in the office the next day. Like a blog post, I built up the contents of the book line by line, then like a blog post, different topics that went into the construction of different chapters.
As it was my first book, I managed to finish the drafts in time due to a constant urging in back of my head to finish the chapter X by the end of this week. I kept doing that when I had my holidays, or after arriving from work in the evening. Even when I visited relatives or did my gardening on the weekends, I managed to have this constant reminder which allowed me to keep up my pace with the delivery schedule. I'd also like to thank many other accomplished authors out there who encouraged amateurs like me to go about with the writing business and will definitely encourage and help anyone who stumbles here with his/her writing plans as it is as satisfying as drinking a fresh coconut water when extremely thirsty on a hot summer day.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hi Sumit

Great to hear that you have written and published a book.

I am almost similar to you that I self published with lulu.com and my own website, but currently giving it for free (Its a very short version of the book and was meant to get user feedback). Now I wish to expand it and publish a full fledged book.

I would like to catch up with you and it would be great if you can guide me on a few things on how to proceed on this.

- Rajaraman R
http://programmersmotivation.com