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by Scott Stirling.
Original Post: Writing The JUnit Book
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Some will disagree (especially authors of other "JUnit-ish" books), but I think my co-author JB and I are writing the best and only book on JUnit that any hard core JUnit user would need or want. Vincent Massol of Jakarta and now JUnit in Action fame has his excellent book (also published by Manning, as is our book), which I got to review in advance. And there is a recent O'Reilly book on XP and Java which features JUnit, and there are several other books that "feature" JUnit. But our book is a companion/compendium of JUnit tips, tricks, examples and advice squarely focused on JUnit. Other things are featured of course, but the book is about using JUnit through and through. I owe it to Vincent for getting me involved in his and now my and JB's JUnit books.
So what's it like writing a book? This is my second book. The first was the hugely overlooked (ha ha) and now obsolete Java Server Pages Application Development. A lot of work went into that little book, most of it mine. I was one of 3 original authors, of which one bailed out soon after cutting the book deal and the other barely delivered two chapters. Ben Forta got us the book deal, without which there would have been no book, but he didn't write any of it. The other 4 guys listed each contributed one or two chapters. I ended up writing the table of contents and over half the chapters. Now it's out of print and available at Amazon for 60 cents! At least I'm listed as the first author, although it took about a year before they changed it to that, possibly to shield Ben Forta's good name (he's involved in several books, especially ColdFusion books). ;-) It was a good book written by some of the people working on the JRun Servlet/JSP container, but personally I thought the Manning JSP book was the best at the time.
Writing books is hard. I don't know how people have the time if they have real jobs too. And for a lot of computer books you want them written by people with real jobs so you have at least some idea that they know what they're talking about. I work all day and try to put in a couple hours a night. It's not easy to do that. Of course I pin my hopes on the hours and hours of free time I'll have on the weekend, which goes by so flipping fast I feel rushed and stressed right up until I crash at some ungodly hour. Since I wrote my last book I well understood why people always dedicate books and make copious apologies to their wives and children in the acknowledgements. It's a real recipe for getting on your family's bad side unless they don't like having you around.
One of the toughest things in writing a computer book is the table of contents or "TOC." You have to essentially plan out the contents and the organization of the book before you write it. Even once you've written the whole TOC, it's not done. As you write the chapters you think of other things to add to the TOC, things to remove, re-organize or rename. You even begin to question to the whole organizing principle of the TOC -- is it functional? product/tool-based? increasing complexity? most common to most esoteric? alphabetical?
You need the TOC early for the publisher and so you and any co-authors can divvy up the work. And the TOC works itself out as you write the chapters. So writing the chapters becomes the hardest part. It's just like writing software. You have all the same challenges of insufficient planning, cowboy coding, lack of inspiration, endless rat holes to tweak some code example into holy perfection while losing all perspective on its relative importance to the book as a whole. You may not hear from your co-author as much as you like, and if I am your co-author that's no less true. Sometimes it seems like that S.O.B. might actually be avoiding me! ;-)
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