It's shipping!

The book is finally making its way into hands of eager developers. Time for a bit of reflection. Writing this book was like one long code sprint. Because many topics couldn't be written about until the Drupal 5 codebase was frozen, we stacked a lot of the writing towards the end of the cycle. That meant that often we were each writing a new chapter, soliciting informal reviews from experts in a topic area from within the Drupal community, reviewing a chapter in the technical edit phase, and reviewing a chapter in the copy edit phase simultaneously. Towards the end, we added production-ready proof reviews to the menu.

Like a software project, the scope of the book had to be firmly enforced or it would not be in your hands today. But I'm glad it is. I'm also really happy that Matt agreed to be coauthor. Often his work would spur mine on (and, I think, vice versa). chx was amazing too, often turning around code reviews in a matter of hours. The Drupal community is, in short, amazing.

I'll just summarize by saying: whew.

And in case you've read the author info, here are some photos of a Bell & Howell Apple ][.