Hmm, lemme see what I can pull out of the deepest recesses of my brain
The year was 2009, and at that point I had written five books for Apress on topics including JavaScript, Java, DWR, ExtJS and Dojo - generally speaking, web development and related technologies. Tangential, but I was approached about the first book in late 2005 based on some articles I had written and just put on my personal site - writing books was never a thing I had considered before then.
One day, early in 2009, I get an email from some guy named Mitch Allen, asking if I'd be interested in writing a book about this new thing coming out called webOS. He explained how it was a new mobile OS, plus a brand new smartphone for it, and how it was this brand new concept (he was really pushing the notion of everything being written with web technologies) and given my past books he thought I might be a perfect fit to write one for webOS.
The part that's a bit fuzzy in my head is how he was hooked up with Apress, who ultimately published the book... I'm sitting here wondering if maybe an editor at Apress approached me first and then hooked me up with Mitch... but either way, it's the emails (and then a couple of phone calls) with Mitch I most remember, because I was kind of reluctant to do it because even having written several books, I was kind of nervous about taking on something at that point I knew nothing about, or THOUGHT I knew nothing about anyway (it's one thing to hear it's a mobile OS based on web technologies, which I knew well, but another to take on the whole concept of a mobile OS, which is something at that ponit I knew little about... well, that's actually not true: I had done A LOT of PocketPC/Windows CE development years before, so I really knew more than I thought... it's just that whole self-doubt thing, you know?)
Anyway, Mitch finally convinced me, and he hooked me up with the pre-release SDK, and I believe he arranged to have a pre-release Pre sent my way too (plus an emulator and access to the then-private Palm dev site they were building, etc.). I remember a lot of conversations about how the card paradigm was a key part of it, and when I finally got the emulator up and running (I definitely don't remember all the details, but I definitely DO remember those early days being VERY challenging to get anything working) it was, honestly, revalatory. I actually enjoyed PocketPC, but when you finally see webOS up and running, how smooth and "alive" it was, you really did feel like you were seeing the future.
And then, when I started diving into the SDK and started to understand how it really WAS just developing a webapp, something I had been doing since 1995, It was amazing. Especially as compared to the PocketPC days, which was all C/C++... well, let's just say those early days of exploring this coming platform was A LOT of fun.
Then, before long, the Pre arrived. Now, we all know the early Pre's had a lot of kinks to work out, but what I got was, let's say, even more challenging. I couldn't at that point activate it on Sprint (which I happened to be a customer of), so it was purely wi-fi at that point. But to say it was buggy would be an understatement. Another tangent, but I remember getting the Pre on release day to be my daily driver, and it was, bluntly, an utter nightmare to get set up. I remember having to drive all around town trying to get a good signal to get through the setup process (I'm sure that was 99% Sprint's fault and not Palm's but still).
So yeah, I spent a good chunk of 2009 writing the book. As with (almost) all my books, I present a couple of app projects, tear them apart, show you how I built them, the problems I encountered, the solutions, and so on. I always liked that "practical" approach, rather than a whole bunch of little contrived examples that I see a lot of authors do. I always felt like seeing a real - if not anything special - full project, and how all the pieces fit together is something developers often need but have trouble finding. Either what they're shown is trivial and not a complete app, or it IS a complete app, but it's overly complex and presents way more than they need, so there's a lot of cruft to cut through. I always tried to find the right balance (whether I succeeded or not isn't my call, of course! LOL).
And, also with almost all my books, one of the projects is always a game. Since I started programming around 1978 or so, I've always found games to be a project type that provides a ton of learning benefit. They force you to confront all sorts of issues in various problem spaces that are applicable more generally. DS&A, performance, architecural concerns, games touch on all of it. So, any time someone asks me what they can do on the side to learn stuff (a question I get asked by my teams on the job a fair bit), I always say write games. They are by nature fun, so they tend to hold your attention and keep you engaged, while teaching you a lot whether you realize it or not. So, Far Out Fowl was the game choice for this book, just because I felt like it had the right balance: not too complex, but complex enough to be a good learning experience. And it was also very doable with the web technologies webOS required.
The book was published in, I believe, December 2009, and that was that. I did a couple of presentations at various places about webOS after that... I remember one in Baltimore at a preDevCamp, and I think another somewhere in upstate New York, some user group I don't quite remember the name of. One or two others I think.
So yeah, that's pretty much the story as best as I can remember it
As for the process, it's a fair bit of work writing a book, going through several phases. For this book, and most of the Apress books, you basically get two weeks to write each chapter. That's a challenge when you also have to write a whole project (yet another tangent: I look at some of the projects I did for my first few books and, honestly, they blow my mind that I was able to get them done so fast - especially the game I wrote for the DWR book, that was WAY bigger than most that I've done). Basically, the pattern was I'd spend a week writing the code, then a week writing the chapter. Kind of nuts for some chapters honestly.
After that, it goes to an editor, who gives you feedback... here, it's mostly comments about content, things that could be clearer, suggestions for additions or changes, etc. They're coming at it from a largely non-technical background at this point, though clearly they have to have SOME technical ability. After that, and after doing some revisions based on those comments... so yeah, the two weeks writing code and a chapter? You're ALSO doing revisions on the previous chapter(s) at the same time... it goes to a technical reviewer. Their job, of course, is to come at it from a purely technical perspective; does the code work as described, did I do anything TOO wacky that should be changed, are the technical explanations accurate and clear, etc. And then, you get those TR comments back and have to do revisions based on them.
After that, it goes through a copy editing phase, which is all the typical stuff: spelling, grammar, etc. That tends to be fairly easy to get through, but again, you're doing it while writing other chapters and doing editor and TR revisions...
...all while holding down a full-time job. I've always been someone that didn't require or get much sleep, but during writing a book it goes down to almost nothing. In fact, I'm finishing my 14th now and it has damn near killed me since I have greatly expanded responsibilities at work over the last two years. I'm PRETTY sure this is going to be the last just because I'm an old man now and I can't keep doing that
Aaaanyway, after the copy editing it goes to layout. Here, you FINALLY get to see what this thing it going to look like for real, with all the images and styling and all that as it'll appear in print. You have to go through it all one last time and make last-minute corrections, but after that it's off to the printers, and a few weeks later you get some dead trees in a box to share with people (probably final tangent: when I started writing books, you got 20 comp copies... now, you get 5... the publishing industry isn't what it used to be, and we won't even talk about the advances and royalties - let's just say it was borderline never financially worth it writing books, now it DEFINITELY isn't, so if you don't have some other motivation then I'd never suggest someone write a book these days).
Well, not sure if that's what you were looking for or whether that was just a big wall of superfluous text, but there you have it
(oh, I guess I should have mentioned, just in case anyone doesn't recognize the name; Mitch Allen was CTO of Palm)
