3 ms·
i used to work for one of the uk's larger training companies (the instruction set) and we were approached by Addison-Wesley UK to turn one of our c++ courses in
by zabzonk 4y ago
i used to work for one of the uk's larger training companies (the instruction set) and we were approached by Addison-Wesley UK to turn one of our c++ courses into a book. i had written about half of the course, so i said sure - how hard can it be?
the answer was: very hard.
when you are presenting a training course, you can do a lot with personality, hand-waving and stuff you had just read about the previous day. this does not work for a book. i found even transposing the course to book chapters really hard, and i eventually said "no can do".
i did do some tech review stuff for them afterwards, and got a couple of hardbound volumes of knuth as payment.
bottom line - writing a book is hard!
- weird_user 4y agoHow hard can it be to turn a book into a course instead? I guess it's also hard because courses and books are consumed by different audiences.
- zabzonk 4y agoactually, our original windows programming in c course translated petsold's book into a course and all the punters hated it! i don't think it is a good book anyway, and i eventually got funding to completely re-write it, to good effect.
- __mharrison__ 4y agoI did this with my first book. Have written about 7 since. My book on XGBoost is coming out this week. Writing a book is a marathon. Anyone who tells you different is lying.