More Coding in Delphi

First of all, I want to once again thank all of you who have purchased, read, or otherwise supported my book Coding in Delphi.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again  — the response has been overwhelming and humbling.  The book has been more successful than I could have ever hoped for.

It’s so successful, in fact, that I’ve decided to write another one – More Coding in Delphi.  I am once again using the LeanPub publishing platform.  LeanPub is really an interesting tool – it makes it really, really easy to produce a book. Highly recommended.  You write the book in Markdown, and they take that and turn it into PDF, MOBI, and ePUB files for you.  Easy as pie.  I’ve been using MarkdownPad for writing the book.  It does a nice job of helping you write Markdown text. 

By default, LeanPub uses DropBox.  First, I granted LeanPub access to a shared folder on Dropbox.  Then, when I go to publish a preview or the real thing, LeanPub looks in that folder for a file called “Book.txt” which describes the format of the book by pointing to *.md files.  It then accesses those files in the shared folder and creates the book. 

This time around, though, they’ve added a new feature where you store the book in GitHub and they pull from the repository to get the files for the book.  Cool.  When the book is ready for proofing by any of you interested in doing so, you’ll get access to the manuscript by pulling it from the private repository on Github.  So if you want to help out, you’ll need to brush up on your Git. It also means that I get the benefits of a DVCS, and you guys can make pull requests if you have improvements for me. 

Right now, the outline for More Coding in Delphi is currently:

• Four Thoughts on Coding Before We Start
• Encapsulation, CQS, Postrel’s Law, Compostion over Inheritance
• Duck Typing
• JSON
• Aspect-oriented Programming
• Design Patterns
• Observer Pattern
• Adapter Pattern
• Decorator Pattern
• Another Pattern to be named later
• Another Pattern to be named later
• Parallel Programming
• Model-View-ViewModel

That feels a little thin to me right now, so I am seeking more topics.  If you want to suggest anything, I’m all ears — either comment here on this post, or join the Google Community for the book.  Remember the philosophy of the book, though – it’s all about the code.  I’ll write about code frameworks, RTL type stuff, etc., but I don’t want too many screen shots of forms in the book.  There will be some in the MVVM chapter, but the idea is that the book covers code and how to write good code.   That’s what I want to focus on.  I’m also open to turning “Four Things” into five or six or seven things, so if you have small topics – a page or two, not enough for a full chapter — I’d love to hear those as well.

Okay, so now the real work begins.  It’s a lot of work to write a book. My hope is to have the book published by the end of this year.  I know that I can’t do it without your help – you guys made the first book possible.  Again, I’m grateful to all you readers and supporters.