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Dear Carol,
since you are going to be my editor for a possible new Python book,
I would like to present myself. Here is my bio from Artima.com:
Michele Simionato started his career as a Theoretical Physicist,
working in Italy, France and the U.S. He turned to programming in
2003; since then he has been working professionally as a Python
developer and now he lives in Milan, Italy. Michele is well known in
the Python community for his posts in the newsgroup(s), his articles
and his Open Source libraries and recipes. His interests include
object oriented programming, functional programming, and in general
programming metodologies that enable us to manage the complexity of
modern software developement.
You can find more about my view on technical writing on my first post
on Artima: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=235871
Currently, I am writing a book about Scheme, by posting one chapter per week
on my blog. You can find the first 18 chapters here:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~micheles/scheme/TheAdventuresofaPythonistainSchemeland.pdf
This book is not intended for sale, since I do not think there is a
large enough mass of readers for Scheme books, but you can have a look
to it to ascertain if you like my style (warning: the book is not
very practically-minded on purpose).
A Python book would be different, since there is certainly a large
community of people using Python professionally every day - I am one
of them - and such people would be interested in more concrete
applications.
There are already a lot of Python books for beginners, but not many
for intermediate programmers. On the other hand, there is demand for
this kind of books, since nowadays Python frameworks are becoming more
and more sophisticated and users wanting to understand how their
framework of choice works have to know Python pretty well.
In particular, there are plenty of new Python features which as used
in famous frameworks like Django, Pylons, SQLAlchemy, which are
however not well known to the average programmer. I refer in
particular to metaprogramming techniques such as decorators,
descriptors, metaclasses and such things than only six or seven years
ago were regarded as esoteric whereas nowadays are common place.
Still, the world of the published books has not kept the pace with the
development in the Python world, so a book on those subjects would be
of service to the community, I think.
I plan to write the book in two parts: the first part would be more
technical, explaining the various techniques by means of hands on examples;
the second part would be at higher level, discussing things like
architectural choices, best practices, when using a feature is
justified and when not, etc. I think the average programmer (and
that includes the clever ones, especially the *too* clever ones ;)
needs some guidances on those aspects.
The provisional title for the book is "Object Oriented Python",
since the main focus would be to discuss in detail the Python
object model and its applications.
The size would be of around 300 pages. I think I would
need six months to finish it, more or less.
I am writing the introduction chapter, to make clear what I have
in mind and to give a more concrete book proposal, but I would like
to make clear a few things from the beginning (I have already
said them to the previous editor, but let me repeat them anyway):
1. I want to have the right to publish extracts of the book on my blog or
in other public forums, both before and after publication.
2. Moreover, possibly after a grace period (say one year) I want to have
the right to redistribute the entire content of the book for free.
3. I want to put the source code for the book in a public repository,
so that everybody can try it, possibly even before publication.
4. I want to write the book in a non-proprietary format (i.e. not the
Word format).
I know that many publishers allow this kind of freedom. Some
publishers even leave full freedom to the authors to put a free copy
of the book on their site, in plain text format, both before and
after print. This is not a strict requirement for me, but it
would be a nice thing to have.
The main advantage of having a public draft is that I would basically
get help for free from advanced readers; moreover people would know
about the book, so that we would get advertising for free.
Those are my thoughts; please let me know what you think.
Best regards,
Michele Simionato
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