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20080312 Wednesday March 12, 2008

Maven Integration for Eclipse If you're a Maven user and like Eclipse, you might want to checkout the new Maven Integration Plugin for Eclipse 0.9.0. Euxx has a couple blog posts talking about the new features - looks like pretty cool stuff to me.

The second feature is especially cool. If your dependencies supply SCM information - you can import the project from its source control system. Maven may have warts, but it also has incredible potential. Posted in Java at Mar 12 2008, 04:22:43 PM MDT 2 Comments

Scott Bain on Writing and Publishing a Book Scott Bain has an interested blog entry called Writing and Publishing a Book:

I recently completed the process of getting a book published ("Emergent Design"). It was my first time doing this, and I thought it might be valuable to some of you if I shared some of the things I learned about writing a book, and about the publishing world.
...
Now, it turns out that I made a bit of a mistake, but got lucky.

The mistake? I wrote the book, then went to the publisher. This can lead to a real disaster. You may have written a beautiful, smart, compelling book for which there is no market whatsoever. Even a great book that nobody wants to read is worthless.

In my case, I knew there was a market because the market had asked me to write the book. Still, if I'd gotten involved with the publisher earlier, several things would have happened:

  1. They would have kept me on a writing schedule. From time to time I got lackadaisical about getting the book done, and the publisher would have held my feet to the fire a little. That would have been healthy for me.
  2. They would have reviewed chapters as I wrote them, which would give me early and frequent feedback. In other words, I would have gained all the benefits of using a Lean/Agile approach.
  3. They would have helped me write. I didn't realize that publishers have extensive support mechanisms to help their authors; access to peer-review, copy editors, technical editors, and so on.
In other words, they would have really smoothed the process. [Read More]

Good to know - thanks Scott! I've been thinking about writing a book again and was actually considering writing first and shopping for a publisher later. I guess that's the wrong approach eh? Posted in General at Mar 12 2008, 04:12:29 PM MDT 3 Comments