 |
| SQL Server 2019 Administration Inside Out |
Honored again to be leading the talented SQL Server 2019 Administration Inside Out author team, and share some fun insights from the team as the book is in its final edits.
Technical book writing is such a mixed bag of emotions - long hours writing, existential doubt and validation, progress in seeing chapters move through editing stages, Sisyphean edits, wrangling metadata and chapter status, pride in the finished product, and finally some post-traumatic stress as the next major release of SQL Server approaches. It's been a pleasure to be the ersatz leader of the team, even though I'm not the first name on the book, a lot of work from everyone on the cover goes into producing the content, including our two beloved technical editors Meagan Longoria and Louis Davidson.
So a "fun" look back at our time on the book, spent mostly in Q4'19, seems appropriate as we near publishing.
A little bit on the cover order. We broke up the "shares" of workload on the book by chapter. Authors who revised/added to existing chapters received one share. For net new chapters (for example, our entirely new final chapter on Big Data and Machine Learning features of SQL Server 2019) an author received three shares. Combine all those shares together, and we came up with a cover order, descending. It doesn't necessarily translate to chapter count or effort, and I can attest personally that with all the new changes necessary for SQL Server 2019, existing chapters' revisions were considerably more work than we thought! Exciting that the book has a lot of new value even for existing chapters, and something to note for next time as we plan workloads...
Similar to our fun author survey from the 2017 book, we the author and tech editor team put answers to questions. This was a nice break while the chapters were progressing through their final edits. The 2019 edition of this book series should be on shelves in Q1'20 and is available for pre-order now everywhere books are sold.
As for this book's fun author survey, I found it interesting how half this team writes with music and half the team
must not, how some of us write/edit in odd nooks and some in their home office enclaves, how some of us know how to spend free time and some of us have forgotten how, and how all of us love the new
scalar function inlining feature of SQL Server 2019...
1. What music if any did you listen to while writing or editing?
