First draft complete

I have completed the first draft of my book and all of my 26 chapters have been submitted to my publisher. Of those chapters, 24 have already been  reviewed by Ben Cotton, my technical reviewer, and revised as necessary. I have also made significant progress on producing a bibliography and a list of keywords for indexing. Fortunately I do not need to do the actual indexing because my list is very long.

I received the proof for the cover and it looks very good. It is actually pretty amazing to see a book cover with my name on it. I contributed a couple chapters to the book “Inside OS/2” about 30 years ago, and although my biography was inside as an author, my name was not on the cover. So this is quite special for me. I hope it won’t be the last because I already have an idea for my next Linux book. More on that as my thoughts on that begin to solidify.

I am still well ahead of schedule and expect this book to be available earlier than the original estimates. I will post the availability dates here as soon as I know what they are expected to be. There is still a lot of work to do, such as reviewing the galley proofs.

 

Book progress

I have been making good progress on my book. I am still ahead of schedule and expect to finish well ahead of the deadline. This project has been a lot of work, but the results will be well worth it. I will continue to post messages here to keep you informed of my progress and when we have availability dates set for the electronic and hard copy versions.

Book thoughts

As I started working on my book this morning, I looked at the total word count for the chapters I have already completed and the number is just over 95,000 words. I know that many books are longer but I am not yet finished.

What I really started thinking about was back in high school when my teachers would give us writing assignments of 500 or 1,000 words and I thought that was huge. It always seemed like I was adding serial adjectives to try to stretch my word count. Now it seems I can’t say anything in less than a few thousand words and more is better.

How things change.

Book status

I continue to make good progress on my book, The Linux Philosophy for System Administrators. I have now completed 15 chapters and technical reviews have been completed on 13 of those. I am currently working on chapters 16, 17, and 18.

I find that writing this book has been very interesting. The research required to write a book of this nature has allowed me to learn a considerable amount.

More to come.

Book Deal Signed

I recently signed a contract for a book deal with Apress publishing. My book is tentatively titled, “The Linux Philosophy for System Administrators.” My intention is for it to be the book that I wish I had when I started as a System Administrator (SysAdmin) many years ago.

Apress specializes in books for IT professionals, developers, and technical communities around the world. I am pleased to be associated with them in this effort.

I will post more information over the coming weeks and months in order to let you know more about the book itself and to keep you abreast of our progress. I do not currently have a publication date but I think it will be sometime in the second half of 2018.

 

Welcome to my renovated blog

I have just renovated my personal blog – yes, this one – because I have some interesting news coming up soon. I will share it as soon as I can, and I am very excited. All of the old stuff you used to find here is no longer available so don’t bother looking for it.

Stay tuned for more details as they become available.