Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Write a Book Exactly as If You're Developing Code

A book is a product and writing books is exactly the same as developing a product. I'm using XP and Agile technical practices and techniques to write my first book Guess what? It works perfectly!

The story started sometime ago when I heard about LeanPub. It was cool and I thought I'll use it once. Now, I'm actively writing, or rather developing my first book: Refactoring to Clean Code:

The experience is very similar to developing a software product. Or, I can say it is exactly the same.
I'm not gonna talk about the book topics as features which may or may not suite your target customers, and how you should frequently pivot your strategy till you reach a solution market fit. These are very obvious similarities. Rather, I'll talk about the actual development of the book, producing book chapters, which is very similar to writing code modules.
I'm using version control, issue tracking, and full traceability (using github). I'm also using continuous deployment. Hah? yes, it is that black magic in software which enables features to be instantly deployed on production with very little overheads (for this, I use automated hooks which links githup with leanpub. Leanpub automatically generates a new version of the book upon every push from my side on github)
Finally, I'm using a full fledged development environment (Atom) which has realtime linter to check bugs on the fly (spelling and grammar mistakes). Atom in connects directly to github. So, I develop and commit changes on the same window.
Later on, I will prepare a test environment for my early adopters and reviewers. They will receive special editions from leanpub. They may open issues on githup, and even they may fix parts of the book and send me pull requests on github 
Those who love coding, if they thought of the book as a software product, they will love writing as well 
Would you like to become a reviewer (or early adopter)?
If you would like to become one of the early adopters, please let me know. Here is a link to the book with highlights about the contents:

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Guidelines for Reviewing my Book: Refactoring to Clean Code


  • If you found a typo, change it right away and submit a pull request
  • If you have a better wording or phrasing, you have two choices:
    • Submit a pull request
    • Open an enhancement
  • If you open an enhancement, please link it to the section you're commenting on as such:
    1. browse the file on github
    2. hover on the section, you'll find a small link appearing as in the following screen shot. Copy the link and paste it in the issue.