Mirlixs thoughts Programming, gamedeveloping and the rest

Writing a book

I just received a printed copy of the book I wrote. I will use this post to describe what I learnt while writing a book and try to give some tips which might help you when you are thinking about writing a book yourself.

Writing a book was a rewarding task but also quite demanding. I had a rather tight schedule and also had to study and work for my part time job besides trying to keep my social life, so I had to keep a lot of different things ,which happened side by side, in my mind, which taught me how to multitask and also showed me once again how important a good calender synced with your mobile-phone is, otherwise I probably would have forgotten most of my appointments. Keeping to the schedule itself wasnt such a problem, but rather the constant nagging in my brain that I should work on the book instead of going out with friend/playing a game/reading a book was unnerving. Thankfully I have this part of the process behind me and now Im eagerly waiting to hear the first responses from readers.

I learnt a lot during writing this book. The most important thing was that writing the text itself is quite easy, what is a lot harder is to come up and implement examples to show the point you want the reader to understand. Creating a good example and making the code complete and understandable at the same time is difficult. For me the best way was to start with an easy example and then use this example to create the more complex ones, this way the new examples are based on something the reader already know and the reader can see what exactly has changed from the last example to this one. The book has over 100 examples and they all come from around 4 different source examples.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you cant read your text often enough, each time I reread a page I found some errors and sentences I wasnt satisfied with, also look at your graphics and diagrams, errors there are a lot harder to spot then in text itself, especially if there isnt a spelling mistake but an error in the graphics.

An interesting thing I noticed was that like many others I didnt allocate a fixed time frame in which I wrote my book. I knew when my deadline was and after the first two chapters I could guess how long I would need for the next chapter, so I just worked on the book when I was in the mood, of course when a deadline was near I had to work even when I wasnt really into it, but most of the time I was able to finish the chapter only using time where I was really motivated to do so, which I hope helped to quality of the book.

And now for a bit of advertising the link to the book : https://www.packtpub.com/ogre-3d-1-7-beginners-guide-for-real-time-3d-applications/book