A Book About D and Tango
Wednesday, December 5th, 2007We were hoping to keep this under the radar for a little bit longer, but thanks to comments in a post at reddit the cat is already out of the bag. A couple of times on this blog I’ve mentioned, in passing, a project I was involved in but didn’t give any details about it. Kris Bell, Lars Ivar Igesund, Sean Kelly, and myself have been collaborating over the past few months on a book to be published by Apress, Learn to Tango with D.
The book is part of an Apress series called firstPress. Books in this series are rather short and serve as an introduction to and overview of emerging tech. Successful firstPress books potentially open the door for more in-depth books to be published by Apress down the road. We had a limited budget of pages to squeeze everything into, so much of the book is a fairly rapid, high-level view of what D and Tango are all about. We did, though, meet the primary goal of introducing both D and Tango and went into enough detail to get newcomers started.
We hadn’t announced the book yet for a couple of reasons. First, while it has been available for preorder on both the Apress site and Amazon for some time, we were wanting to get the information describing the book, and the author histories, updated first. That hasn’t happened quite yet, though it is in the pipe. Secondly, the book was originally scheduled for publication in December as both pages indicate, but a few weeks ago publication was pushed back to early 2008. We haven’t yet gotten a firm date, so we wanted to have that before saying anything about it. larsivi had wanted to announce at the D Conference, but the lack of a date was why he didn’t.
Walter wrote the foreward and Don Clugston was our technical reviewer. There are a total of eight chapters, each author having contributed two. The first half of the book covers D and the second half Tango. Personally, I’m quite happy with the result. With each of us being first time authors, it’s been quite the learning experience. The people at Apress have been great in putting up with us. In hindsight, I can think of a handful of things I wish I had mentioned in my chapter on the basics of D, but it’s already the longest chapter in the book!
I hope the book will be on the shelves in January, but that’s not for me to say. As soon as I get a firm date, I’ll be sure to post it here. In the meantime, you can preorder Learn to Tango With D
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I’ll post any news related to the book here as I get it. I’ve added a new tag so that you can easily find updates about it. The editing process is ongoing, so I’ll wait until I’m certain about the final chapter titles and such before posting a TOC.
Technorati Tags: D Programming Language, Tango, programming books