Jeff Atwood wrote up a post today on the merits of writing a technical book in this day-and-age and specifically called out my past post on programming book profits and my work-in-progress Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja.

I wanted to give a brief status update on the book and how it’s going. I started the book in early 2008 and was actually quite productive, finishing nearly the entire book that year (with some missing gaps that I fixed up in 2009). There was some work left to do to make it a better book but, honestly, I got caught up in coding and stopped focusing on writing. I had to prioritize my time and I chose to prioritize doing more development and focusing on my personal life. Some time last year Manning brought on a co-author, Bear Bibeault, to finish the book and get it out the door. He’s done a bunch of revision bringing it up-to-date and just the other week I finally wrote the preface. It’s in final revisions now and should be out-the-door very soon. This is a huge relief for me and it’s great that there’s one less thing to worry about.

To the point of Jeff’s post, I would absolutely not write a technical book again. It’s a tedious process and unless you LOVE writing and are really good at it (like Nicholas Zakas or Dave Flanagan) then I suggest that you stick with the medium that is truly successful: Writing long-form articles/blog posts and possibly spinning them off into purchasable ebooks. (As an example, I’d point to Juriy Zaytsev and Peter-Paul Koch both of whom could get any JavaScript position in the world purely based upon the quality of their articles and sites, without ever having written a book.)

I realized at some point in late 2008 that that’s really what I should’ve done with Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja but I was already neck-deep in the book with most of it complete. Ironically working on the book (or not working on it, however you look at it) actually compelled me to NOT blog more as every time I wanted to write a technical blog post I was forcing myself to make the decision “I’m writing about 1000 words on a technical matter, shouldn’t this just be going towards my uncompleted book?” and would just end up writing nothing as a result.

I do feel bad for, and apologize to, the people that pre-ordered hard copy version of my book over the years only to have to wait on a time scale comparable to George R. R. Martin’s writing schedule. Amusingly the book has been extremely successful as a pre-order e-book at Manning.com – it’s the best-selling MEAP book of all time. I’ve gotten numerous emails from readers who’ve gotten enormous benefit from the book, even in it’s rough form, and this has pleased me greatly.

I’m excited to finally have this book be out in the “wild”, as it were. It’s no longer (as Jeff put it) “permanently unfinished”.

I’ve included the preface from my book below, to give some more detail: