My self-published book on being a great developer

138 点作者 davetron5000将近 12 年前

23 条评论

jmduke将近 12 年前

First off, congrats! I can only imagine what a good feeling it is to publish a book (let alone two, as it appears you wrote a Ruby book as well.)I'm going to offer some friendly criticism on marketing. (I can't really comment on the content of the book, given that I haven't read it.)- Invest $50 and buy a nice Wordpress theme off of ThemeForest, because junior software engineers are picky folk. If it nets you two more sales, then it's already paid itself off.- The table of contents tells me what I'm going to learn from this book, not why I want to learn them. Often, the answer to "why" is either "to make a lot more money" or "to build a lot of cool things I wouldn't otherwise." The three points you outline underneath the ToC hit those aspects much more strongly, so I'd move those above the fold.- Throwing up an email list where you send me some snippets and then try to upsell me is advised. I haven't heard of you before, so I'd prefer some credentials before I commit to a purchase (remember, I'm a junior software engineer, so both time and money are scarce resources.) Testimonials would also be helpful here.- There's nothing wrong with a second call to action at the bottom of the page.

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chavesn将近 12 年前

(Hasty, possibly unfounded criticism follows)I'm a software engineer myself, and I already believe that great advice can come from unexpected sources, so I visited your website willing to be convinced that you really do know what you are talking about.These are a few things that I had immediate and decisive opinions on:- Your title here: "My self-published book on being a great developer" - Sets me up to expect advice from someone like myself (otherwise why would you self-publish?) -- which is a good thing. It's a sign that you relate to me. And "on being a great developer". Concise, I really like that. Off to a great start!- "theseniorsoftwareengineer.com" - Good domain name. I like you already. Connotes relation to career and adding the "the" makes me think about the true meaning of "senior".Then I get to your website. Sorry to say, but that's where it goes south.- It reminds me of those scammy "make millions on the internet" advertisement websites. They may actually make a lot of money with their over-the-top styling, so I'm not saying I'm right, but it's a turnoff to me.- Excerpts - Good! But they don't stand out. Call them out! Maybe even link some great quotes to the excerpt page instead of the word "excerpt".- The checklist - it's gotta go. I didn't read it, even though the text was huge.- Try to neutralize the statement "Not interested in management?". I don't think you need to preemptively limit your audience.- The cover -- Your style is up to you, but because the text is fairly small, in thumbnail size it doesn't balance well against the huge text on the rest of the page. And I like large text -- but it just needs to balance well.- Avoid generic statements like "A guide for making the most of your career" or "simple techniques for fixing bugs" -- everyone offers these. What is unique about your take? What did folks like about your blog posts that motivated you to write this book?- Some of the good content, stuff you should highlight better: Stuff about you, "instant download", "197 page eBook", links to your blog posts.Sorry if this is harsh -- I think you are off to a great start and I hope this helps even a little bit.

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huhtenberg将近 12 年前

I don't know. It's great that you wrote it and I can completely understand what sort of undertaking it was, but the problem with any mentoring book is that it should come from a recognized and credible source. If this were an auto-biography book, written from the "what worked for me" angle, it would certainly have an audience. But if it just dispenses advice, then it begs the question what makes you think you are in a position to do that.I am also not sure who it is written for - pretty much every developer above summer intern thinks of himself as a senior :) Over-inflated self-assessment is a norm.

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LargeWu将近 12 年前

So maybe this is nitpicky, but it's the difference between books I buy and books I don't.In the 'Technical Debt and Slop' excerpt, there is an example about determining whether an order is free. Basically it compares the customer's store credit plus discounts against the price of the object. It does not account for quantity, or other items in the user's cart. Essentially, the same store credit amount gets applied to every item. This is a bug in the logic, and it took about 30 seconds of me scanning the article to notice it.Now I realize that's not the point of the excerpt. It's about code duplication. But it's still sloppy writing. That's fine for your blog, but if you expect me to pay, I expect content that is of high quality. Code examples should be complete, and free of bugs.

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acjohnson55将近 12 年前

I think $25 is a bit too much for me, unless people start raving about it. You can price it however you want, you wrote it, but I'd give it a shot if it were half the price, considering you're self-published and without reviews. I'm not trying to devalue your work, but just keep in mind that you may actually make up in quantity sold what you lose in price per item.Also, is this your final product? Knowing that it's going to increase in refinement over time would add to the value proposition for me.Anyway, congrats on writing a book! It's a great accomplishment.

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ewest将近 12 年前

If you want your experience to come through, don't make it the primary point. Your experience will become apparent in the things you write and the way you write about them.Out of the first 9 paragraphs in 'Focus on Delivering Results' you use "I" in 6 of them - you start 3 of them with "I". The excerpt reads more like a biography.I don't know whether you worked with a copy editor - if you didn't, you should have.You also should have had some independent reviews prior to publishing - maybe someone would have been kind enough to tell you about all of those "I"s - they make the text "feel" rough and unfinished.You could go crazy with the "I"s in your "about the author" section, yet let the book's content speak for itself.Given this, the excerpt diminishes the book's value for me, so it's unlikely I would pay $25 for it. If I wanted a biography, I would get a biography.

muppetboy33将近 12 年前

Nice job. I also did this. I got tired after twenty some years of repeating myself to juniors, so I wrote "Coding: On Software Design Process". -- Jonathan<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Coding-On-Software-Design-Process/dp/0615404820" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Coding-On-Software-Design-Process/dp/0...</a>

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web007将近 12 年前

First impression is that you may be a great engineer, but you need a great designer if you want to sell your book. I'm still interested in the content, but it's a definite turn-off to see a site that looks like something I designed (aka not good - references available upon request).Somewhat related, there's a 914kb 1007x1024 black-and-white PNG for a 197x200 image of the author. That should probably be fixed, if for nothing else than it's killing your bandwidth. I only noticed because I thought I was back in dial-up days with how slowly it came through.All of that aside, I'm intrigued. I'm going to bookmark this and come back in a couple weeks, I'll have to see how it looks after you've taken the other comments here on HN into account.

jasonswett将近 12 年前

I'd like to point out that $25 is probably not too much to pay for a book that might earn you an extra $X,000-$X00,000 over the course of the rest your career. There's of course a chance that you could read this book and increase your earning power by exactly zero, but I have a hunch that there's at least $25 worth of good advice here.The design is FINE! It communicates what the book is about in a way that takes very little effort on the visitor's part. I think Dave did a perfectly okay job with it.I've actually been saving up thoughts and writing scraps to write a book like this myself, but I'm probably not qualified and I'm glad somebody else did a better job first. Nice work.

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ruswick将近 12 年前

This design is visually abrasive. I would suggest getting rid of the the purple accents and changing your typography.

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shubb将近 12 年前

A lot of negativity here, mostly based on the 90s site.Reading the excerpts, what the author is doing is quite clever. He creates an identity, the reliable, effective Senior Engineer.The reader wants to be more like that identity, so he takes you through different situations and says, 'This is how a Senior Engineer would act and think in this situation'. For example, [A senior engineer would not ship his code until it was really production quality, even when rushed].The situations and issues he talks about are often a result of social pressure (to ship, to deliver features that don't matter in order to show progress on the burn chart). It's easy to get caught up in those moments. If the book allows you to step outside that, and think 'What would a true Senior Engineer do here', and the answer is 'The long term right thing', I think it's valuable.But not $25 of valuable. Sorry, that is too much for a speculative purchase (which this is, given the author isn't a known quantity like Jonathan Locke at bottom of the thread.

wasd将近 12 年前

You absolutely need an email capture. I'm not ready to buy yet but if you sent me periodic posts I would be more inclined over time.

davetron5000将近 12 年前

Author here. Apologies that the design of the website has been so distracting. I ultimately decided that I needed to ship, but I can see where those commenters are coming from (and I appreciate that most of you have been constructive). I CAN say you should all be glad to not see the 3-D book I created in Pixelmator. I saved you from SOMETHING, at least :)Since I've now made real revenue just on the first days' sales, I feel more confident spending actual money on the site design.I opted NOT to use a template because none of them seemed adaptable to what I wanted to do.Anyone willing to help me out, or can recommend someone who would?

fekberg将近 12 年前

Congratulations Dave! About a year ago I self-published my first book and it ended up being the best thing I ever did (so far). How did you write the book? I used LaTeX for mine, less mess with the tools! Another thing, have you considered going Print-On-Demand as well? I've got my book on Amazon using CreateSpace, they don't take a lot of the money and the book gets good exposure; while I also have a DRM free PDF, ePub and Mobi. As well as on Kindle.Good luck with the sales and again, congratulations on becoming an author!

noahc将近 12 年前

I just wanted to say congrats on getting something out in the world.Don't worry about all the criticism on this page, particularly from anyone who has never written a book before.

pydanny将近 12 年前

Congratulations on self-publishing your work. I know how much work it is (published a book this year, working on a second) and I know what it's like when you get criticism. Keep up the good work and a big lesson we learned was this:Take the negative criticism on your book and reverse it. Every time we got dinged on a problem with the text in our book we worked on that chapter until we felt like no one could ever complain.

laureny将近 12 年前

I can't help but think that giving generic coding advice by using a dynamically typed language is anathema to a book, because you see all these symbols in the source (customer, account, etc...) but you have no idea what methods they respond to and which ones are compatible with which other ones.I hope that as a senior software engineer, you make your points using other languages than Ruby in your book.

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piratebroadcast将近 12 年前

Sorry to he a hater but that landing page looks like balls and the book cover looks like balls. Looks like a high schoolers HTML project. Also, 'Who you are and what you have done and what makes you qualified' should be higher up and more noticable. I would find someone who has done something similar in the past and base your sales pitch/designs from that.

sgloutnikov将近 12 年前

Congrats and Thank You! I just purchased the book, and look forward to reading it. As a young software engineer, I enjoy reading books like this to get many different points of view that I can learn from.In relation to the comments about the price--I think it is reasonable. It really depends on how much you think you can get out of this book, or a book like this.

trvd1707将近 12 年前

I hope the book had a good revision using a good spell-checker. Please fix the e-reaeers on your page to e-readers.

amykhar将近 12 年前

One mild criticism. A book such as this is really going to depend on the author's reputation. You buried the info about yourself way below the fold.I'm also not certain about the price. I would pay that price from a big name. For anybody else, I wouldn't go above $10.

lightbritefight将近 12 年前

You have a minor misspelling under book types:ePub (iPad and most other e-reaeers)

celwell将近 12 年前

Nice to see a programming book that's more meta. I'm sure that it will be useful; especially for new college grads.

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