Those of you who know me, know that I’ve been working on my book, ActionScript Animation : Making Things Move! for quite a while and have been steadily using it as an excuse to not do all kinds of other things.
Well, the book is coming down the home stretch, and I hope to have the last of it written by next weekend. Wow, does that feel good. There will still be some editing to do, but we have a pretty good jump on that, so it won’t be much. It should be off to the printer well before the end of this month, and in stores sometime in October I guess.
I was just looking over some old emails and realized that I proposed this book last November, and signed the contract for it in December. So time-wise, this was equivalent to a full term pregnancy. Seems about right. This project has been the bane of my existence. But now that it’s almost done, I’m getting really, really excited about it.
It’s going to be a great book. And I don’t say that to toot my own horn. I say that because I included all the stuff that I wish I had known when I was starting out with ActionScript. All the funky math and physics stuff that I had to scrape up a little bit at a time. This is the book that I was looking for for years and it didn’t exist, which is why I wrote it. I only hope that I did it justice.
I have to say that I learned a hell of a lot while writing it, too. When you are writing code for a book, you scrutinize it far, far more than you ever would for any other type of project. You analyze every variable name and function call, trying to make it clear and concise. Even if you’ve written the same type of function a thousand times, when you start looking that closely at it, you can’t help but gain some insight. “Why do I do it that way? Changing this around would make it so much better. Duh!” And there was a whole lot of stuff that I sort of understood well enough to make it work, but not well enough to really describe in detail. This forced me to dig in and really get what was going on.
I’ll keep updating the progress here, as we get closer to publishing.