My friend decided to start writing a book about "Advanced Topics in C#". But really there are a lot of books about c# and about programming languages in general , so is it still worth to write a programming book like that as a commercial job ?
+13
A:
As a commercial job? Almost certainly not.
Obviously I only know about the books I've written or contributed to, but none of them have paid particularly well. Clearly there are some very successful books out there, but they're few and far between - and even then I suspect the money's not terribly good compared with what you can earn for actually coding.
On the other hand, as a way of improving your communication skills and deepening your knowledge, writing is great. You can do that individually on a blog of course, rather than worrying about finding a publisher etc. Being "properly" published comes with ego benefits, mind you... and it's a good way of forcing yourself to be disciplined in your writing. There's a lot to learn from the editing process, as well as tech reviewing1. I wouldn't want to actively discourage anyone from writing a book. Just be aware that it's a lot of work, and it's not going to make you rich. You really need to do it for the love of the thing.
1 If you can find a tech reviewer of Eric Lippert's calibre, it's almost worth writing a book just to get their feedback.
Jon Skeet
2010-10-14 18:36:45
+1 for the last paragraph. Writing a book is always good, if not for readers, for the author.
Benoit
2010-10-14 18:40:41
"none of them have paid particularly well" , WHY ? your books are great and have a lot of readers so what is the reason ?
M.H
2010-10-14 18:41:15
++ for blogging. That, and you reap a larger share of any proceeds.
John at CashCommons
2010-10-14 18:42:11
@M.H.: writing technical books doesn't pay very well. Except for a very few, writing **books in general** doesn't pay very well.
Michael Petrotta
2010-10-14 18:48:44
@M.H. Out of interest, how many copies would you *guess* the first edition of "C# in Depth" sold? I won't give exact numbers, but I'll say whether you're in the right ballpark.
Jon Skeet
2010-10-14 18:56:02
@Michael: My wife seems to do pretty well writing children's books. I'm pretty sure she earns more per hour writing than I do coding at Google. For which I'm extremely grateful, of course...
Jon Skeet
2010-10-14 18:56:44
@Jon Skeet about 20,000?
Gary Willoughby
2010-10-14 19:04:28
@Jon Skeet: hmmmmm,how many copies it sold I really don't have an idea ,but how many people read it I am sure they are millions.its hard to say that many people don't buy , they just go to 4shared.com and rapidshare.com and download the books for free!
M.H
2010-10-14 19:04:38
@Gary: Not that many, but right order of magnitude. @M.H: I doubt that it's really millions... but if tens of thousands of people *have* read the book without paying anything, that kinda explains my "none of them have paid particularly well" comment, doesn't it? :) (I suspect I haven't really lost much money through piracy. I suspect most people who read it for free wouldn't have paid for it anyway.)
Jon Skeet
2010-10-14 19:07:55
@Jon Skeet:maybe the number of your books readers is greater than you imagine, I live in syria (maybe you never heard about us :) tell now) but even here all the IT students and programmers are reading your book and learning from it , so what about the other countries ? I think we will end with huge numbers of readers.
M.H
2010-10-14 19:25:43
@M.H.: I smell that you're trying to talk yourself into writing the book. To be blunt: don't delude yourself, you're unlikely to make pots of money. But writing books is fun - you should do it for that reason alone.
Michael Petrotta
2010-10-14 19:26:16
+3
A:
Is it about profiting or contributing? If it is about contributing and you can differentiate yourself from the myriad of other book authors, go for it! If it is about profiting, only, it just isn't worth the months if not years you would have to invest, to make maybe tens of thousands of dollars tops. This is of course assuming that you have a decent software developer job at the moment.
Michael Goldshteyn
2010-10-14 18:39:09
+2
A:
Charles Petzold has written before about the economics of writing programming books.
Jason
2010-10-14 18:53:11
+2
A:
I wrote a book aimed at beginners using a BASIC (PureBasic) dialect about five years ago. Even though it was aimed at novices, i included an advanced section on pointers, threading, binary operations and windows programming using the Win32 API. If nothing else it made me get my facts straight and made me research to learn everything in depth.
It was a great boost to my confidence as a programmer that every one who read it complimented me on my writing and knowledge. Even the authors of the language reviewed it with great approval.
It won't make you rich, but writing a book will make you get your facts straight about the technology your writing about, otherwise your going to look foolish!
By the way, i used print on demand to keep the costs down and i sold way more than i anticipated! Which was nice! (i made just over £5k) If you want to read it, it's in my profile released under creative commons. :o)
Gary Willoughby
2010-10-14 18:53:50