Today I was pretty surprised when going through my feeds to read that a friend of mine, Maarten Balliauw, has a written a book. The title of the book is ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly:

It’s been quite a job, but there it is: Packt just announced my very first book on their site. It is titled “ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly”, covering all aspects ASP.NET MVC offers in a to-the-point manner with hands-on examples. The book walks through the main concepts of the MVC framework to help existing ASP.NET developers to move on to a higher level. It includes clear instructions and lots of code examples. It takes a simple approach, thereby allowing you to work with all facets of web application development. Some keywords: Model-view-controller, ASP.NET MVC architecture and components, unit testing, mocking, AJAX using MS Ajax and jQuery, reference application and resources.

I always thought, and still think, that writing a book is a massive amount of work. Therefore i really have a lot of respect for people that have the courage to actually write a real book.

In his blogpost Maarten explains why and how he wrote the book. According to his time tracking software, it took him 100 hours to write the book, which is far less than i would expect. On the other side, if you can only use spare time to do the work, it is a lot of time. Maarten also explains that he used Subversion to keep his work versioned and that some people laughed at him for doing so. I don’t think this is such a strange idea. If I ever would write a book (consider the chances small…), I certainly would use Subversion, or a similar tool, to store my work. In fact, when my girlfriend wrote her paper for her last schoolyear I also made her use Subversion to store her word-documents. But i do find it strange that you write a complete book in Word (which is a word processor btw, not a text editor ;) ).

I’m very curious to see and read the book. Btw Maarten, is that your own pair of glasses on the cover? Anyway, Congrats Maarten!