Last year, I wrote Node.js Recipes in a relatively short time span. It was accomplished in something like 120 days, or about 10 days per chapter. This was exhausting and I vowed to my wife that I would not write another book at that pace again.
Then I was tempted. My publisher asked me if I had interest in several titles, and man did I, but after a couple days of deliberating over each one - I could not commit to the time frame.
Then came an introduction from someone within the publisher’s organization that proposed I create a screencast series based upon the book which I had already written. This was something I could get on board with because the material was already written (right?).
So I created a sample video for evaluation and we decided to move forward with another aggressive schedule to record ~6 hours of screencast based upon material in my book.
It turns out this was a pretty agressive and time consuming undertaking as well. Sure the material was already written, but it needed to be reworked into a standard Powerpoint format and of course I would need to be coding most of the stuff I’d already written again. All of this (with the exception of creating some of the powerpoints) was a great time and I enjoyed being able to revisit my book from an angle of a user or reader, rather than an author.
In the end I recorded nearly 12 hours of raw footage for the video which is being post-processed currently and should see release in the near future (no official date that I know of yet - stay tuned for that). The team at Apress has done a fantastic job with the final editing and composition, from what I have seen and I look forward to everyone getting the opportunity to check out the finished product when it is available.
