December 12, 2007, 1:11 PM ET
Django Book has shipped -- and, thoughts on the next book
It's here! At long last, the print copy of the Django Book has shipped. I received my author copies late last week and am still poking at them to make sure that, yes, a tangible book with my name on the cover has actually been printed, on real paper, by a real publisher.
Early drafts of the book have been available free at djangobook.com for more than a year, and co-author Jacob and I are grateful to all of the readers who submitted corrections and suggestions. Jacob is going to update the site soon with the final text of the book (which will be available free under an open-source license), and we plan to revise the online text over time with corrections and additions. There's something nice about having a paper copy, of course.
The book is available on Amazon, and I'm told the big brick-and-mortar bookstores should begin stocking it soon. Looks like it's gotten some buzz already, as it was the number one best-selling "Software Development" book and number four best-selling "Internet" book. Not bad at all! What I'm most proud of is not the fact that the book itself is doing well, but the larger fact that demand for information about the framework is high.
Now that the Django Book is finally in the can, I'm mulling the idea of writing another book -- this time, a book about online journalism. In the past two years, I've been to (way too) many journalism-related events and conferences trying to spread the good word about "journalism via computer programming," and I've detected a strong, I daresay furious, demand, from journalists at all levels in the org chart, for information about this new form of journalism. Higher-ups want to know why they should employ programmers; middle managers want to know how to find them and how to treat them; and working journalists want to learn these skills and strategies. The problem is that I can't point them anywhere for in-depth information. This book would attempt to solve that.
I want to take a shot at writing a manual, a manifesto, a practical guidebook to this emerging discipline of database-driven Web journalism. It would be a combination of high-level strategy and low-level technique, probably split cleanly into two parts (one for the suits, one for the non-suits).
That's about all the thought I've given to this idea. What do you think? If you're a journalist (or even not), is this something you'd be interested in?
