‘Learning MySQL & MariaDB’ Goes to Press§
by Russell Dyer
published: march 17, 2015; revised: september 10, 2017; readers in past month: 158
Over the past few weeks, I worked with the copy and production editors to make corrections to the wording and layout of my new, upcoming book: Learning MySQL and MariaDB. There were plenty of corrections to grammar and word usage, changes my editor and I had not considered. It’s useful to have someone who wasn’t involved in the creation of the book to look freshly at it.
I don’t know how they can do this. It must be very boring work to read a few hundred pages of technical books each week. It’s quite a skills. They also made many changes to the layout of the text (e.g., lining up the examples, making sure words that were hyphenated broke properly, etc.). What tedious work. But these are the things that make O’Reilly a publisher of quality books — the premier publisher of technical books, the equivalent of Oxford University Press in their field.
All of the editing is done now. Last week the production people at O’Reilly sent me the index for my new book to review. The marketing department also finished the text for the back cover. These are the last components for the production of the book. This week I will receive a final PDF version of the book for one last review for minor corrections, if any.
As a component of the back cover, the marketing department asked me to find someone to review the book and give them a quote. Since Colin Charles was one of the tech. reviewers, I asked him to write something. He graciously and quickly did so in time for the production schedule. Below is what he wrote:
“MySQL and MariaDB are among the most commonly used database servers, and with the rapid adoption of MariaDB, this is the book to read to get up to speed on learning both of them. You’ll learn all of the SQL statements and functions you’ll need to know, as well as all of the features of MariaDB. Russell makes it easy and accessible with exercises that will take you through the process of learning — and towards becoming an expert.”
Colin is currently the Chief Evangelist at MariaDB Corp. He is formerly the Community Relations Manager at MySQL Inc. Having been a leader in the community for both MySQL and MariaDB, as well as very advanced in both database ssytems, he’s an excellent person to endorse my book. I’m very pleased to have this quote from him and appreciate very much that he did this for me.
Yesterday, the production people sent me a copy of the new book cover — not just the front of the book, but the entire cover to include the back of the book and the spine. You can see a small version of it above. If you click on the image, you can see a larger version. I think it’s interesting to see how these things come together.
So, all of the writing and editing is finished — after about two years. The index is completed and the cover is done. All that remains is a quick look through the final, complete PDF. Shortly after that, the book will be printed and available for sale at bookstores and on-line on sites like Amazon. As you can imagine, I’m quite pleased to see this book nearing total completion. I can hardly wait until I have a copy in my hands. I’m thinking of having a party to celebrate the book’s release. If I do, I may post some pictures of the party on this site.