a new book idea...

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Tue Dec 4 10:51:25 EST 2012


Colin Holgate wrote:

 > I'm talking with Packt about another LiveCode book. I don't have
 > the time, or the knowledge, to cover all that it needs to be, but
 > I could organize the chapters, if they are written by other people!
 >
 > In theory the nature of the book would be to have a set of chapters
 > that cover one application per chapter. I'm not sure that is
 > practical, it could take a book to describe a whole commercial
 > application, and a chapter may be way too long to describe one or
 > two basic techniques.
 >
 > So, I was thinking , that if some of you that have done full
 > applications are interested, you could write about one or two of
 > the main techniques used in the application, and use the chapter
 > to explain those basic techniques, and hopefully promote your overall
 > application a little bit.

A few of us have been kicking this idea around a bit over the last few 
years, inspired by "Tricks of the HyperTalk Masters", one of the most 
useful books in xTalk history.

But given that book money is slim and divvying up book money among 
multiple authors that much slimmer, it's been hard for us to justify the 
time away from client projects to do it.

Since any money would be negligible anyway, we've pondered giving such a 
book away for free, at last a viable option in this post-printing world 
where distribution costs approach zero.

While a free book would reach the largest possible audience, of course 
that doesn't make it any easier to justify the time for most of the 
folks I've talked to -- but I'm a crazy person so it works well for me. :)

For myself, an ever-growing portion of the tools that drive my business 
are free and open (these days almost everything except OS X and 
LiveCode), so I'm quite motivated to pay some of that forward with 
similarly free works.

I'd be happy to contribute a chapter at no cost to the publisher if the 
publisher were in a position to release the book under similar terms.

Perhaps it could be justified by including ads for other publications 
the publisher offers, or just a way to introduce a new audience to the 
brand.

If a free book wouldn't interest them at all, I'd still be interested in 
contributing depending on the schedule.

Thanks for posting this.  It would be good to finally see a "Tricks of 
the HyperTalk" masters for the LiveCode world.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
  Follow me on Twitter:  http://twitter.com/FourthWorldSys






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