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 find writing the first chapter is always the most difficult when starting a new book. In my opinion, it is important that the first chapter convey at least two things to the reader:
* A general overview of the scope of the book
* A little background information on the topic and other related topics

The real difficulty comes in confining your overview to purely an overview. When talking about such-and-such new feature, for instance, it is fairly easy to get caught up in the details of using the feature, when all you need to do is introduce the feature and let the user trust that the details will be discussed later in the book.

MS Word reports that my word count for the first chapter is only 4663. ;) I've taken a few nights off writing, and as discussed in the last entry, decided to basically rewrite a lot of what I had done. I feel a lot better about how this chapter is turning out.

Scott