Tonight I finished the first real chapter for my book. I say "real" because the introduction doesn't really count as much. It's more of a mission statement than anything else.
Since the book is about ASP.NET MVC, and my approach is to write it from the view of someone with a regular ASP.NET background, this first chapter lays out all of the nuts and bolts. Beyond that, the rest of the book will concentrate on the specific use cases found in every day Web app development, giving the MVC analogs for each. I think it's a novel approach to get busy and skip past all of the stuff that millions of developers probably already know.
Again, it's hard to say if this is something that will sell, but I'm all-in now, so I'm going to finish it, and beat a lot of other books to market. That's my goal. If I don't make anything, well, it'll be a lot like the last book despite selling thousands of copies! (I made a little, actually, but it wasn't much.)
Writing about writing code is kinda hard, because you can't just refactor and wiggle your way around until you get it right. You have to get it right because the reader is counting on you to know what you're talking about. This particular project has forced me to fill in some gaps, but I'm so much better off having to know more detail.
The bug I encountered the other night is still in the blog app, but it's not about MVC. The bug is in the way that comments are parsed (pulling out naughty HTML). Parsing text is always a pain in the ass.
But I feel pretty good about getting that chapter done. Looking at the rest of my agenda, I feel like I can crank. Granted, I still need to get the app into better shape, since it's the example used throughout, but that's in pretty good shape too, if not good and pretty yet.
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