Hi there. My name is Scott Duffy, and welcome to my book writing log. I have documented the process of writing my last two books on this site, and have started my third. This book will be called Visual Studio Team System In Action, and should be available in 2005.

I don't want to keep you in suspense for too long. I should probably tell you a little something about the book I'm currently writing.

The book is tentatively titled "JavaScript 2.0 From the Frontline", and it will be published by Osborne McGraw-Hill early next year. The book is aimed at developers who are already familiar with programming languages (like JavaScript 1.5) - so I don't have to cover the basics of programming. It is designed to get you up to speed on the new language quickly, with lots of relevant examples.

Two days ago, the publisher sent me authoring templates for MS Word. Many computer books belong to a "series" - that is, a family of similar books by the same publisher. The largest series, by far I bet, is the "... For Dummies" books, there are hundreds of different titles. Another example is the "Teach Yourself ... In 24 Hours" series.

Books that belong to a series have to be written in a certain style in MS Word for two reasons: it makes it easier for the layout staff to properly format the book using their software, and publishers would like to maintain some consistency across different titles in the same series.

The thing is, when I applied the MS Word Template the publisher sent over, it basically doubled the number of pages I had written to date, so I was extremely happy. Suddenly, the book was shorter - I was almost finished the first chapter (by pagecount, which is set beforehand), but I hadn't said half of what I wanted to say!

So, last night and tonight I basically rewrote huge chunks of the first chapter. I deleted a couple of pages worth of material that I wasn't entirely happy with, and the chapter is finally starting to look the way I would like it to. Yippee!

Scott