The GIMP Book is Done! (Shallow Thoughts)

The GIMP Book is Done!

Although I haven't been writing about it here, for most of the past year I've been working on a new GIMP book for Apress, called Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional.

Today the work was over: the last bits shipped to the printer! The rest is just waiting (... and waiting ... and waiting ...)

Amazon has a page on it already (complete with typo in the description; sigh) for folks who like to pre-order their books months early. Scheduled release date is currently late April. (I think they have to grow the trees first.)

In case you haven't already heard other authors say it, writing a book is a lot more work than you think it will be. Even if other authors have already told you that it's more work than you think it will be, it's more work than that. If you thought you already knew the subject you were writing about, think again. You'll find out how little you really knew. You'll discover all sorts of options you never noticed in your favorite tools, and new (and often better) ways to do things than the methods you'd been using for years. You'll discover bugs in plug-ins no one's used in a while, and why things you always thought were bugs really aren't.

That's the good sort of "too much work": the kind that keeps you learning, so that you come away from it with more than you started with. It's been fun. But I confess that I'll be glad to take a rest for a while and work on some long neglected coding projects.

I celebrated ship-to-printer with a little GIMP hacking (adding that feature list to configure that I wished for last week, so now GIMP will warn you of any missing features before you start your 45-minute build); and with lamb kebab with zereshk polo at Chatanoga.

Tags: gimp
[ 22:38 Jan 30, 2006    More gimp | permalink to this entry | ]