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My new book has just been released! Here is how I did it and how you can do the same πŸš€

Remo H. Jansen on May 13, 2018

My new book, Learning TypeScript 2.x, has just been released! I'm not going to talk about the book contents in this post because you can learn e...
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Marvin Danig

Awesome write-up Remo, bookmarked!

For a technical book that I wrote recently I ended up using a weird combination: { HAML + STYLUS + javascript }. The results were surprisingly excellent, especially over markdown, where many a times I'd have to insert full HTML tags to get the content right.

HAML is way more expressive than markdown and I can only imagine the possibilities with it!

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Douglas McKechie • Edited

Interesting to hear your experiences and the process you went through for writing the book. I was involved as a technical reviewer for a Packt book a few years ago and have often wondered what it was like for others.

As a reviewer I found it hard work, particularly the unrealistic turn around of 24 hours expected for me to review a whole chapter, including checking that the code worked which often it didn't - it was littered with bugs.

While it was great to get a mention in the front of the book as one of the reviewers, sad to say that the experience put me off working with Packt again.

As you mention they found me through Linkedin because I was an early user of the technology involved. I suppose it was great to help others learn it by contributing to the book.

Congrats on the launch of your new book and I hope it does well.

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Remo H. Jansen

Thanks! I think the short deadlines for the reviews is due to the pace of movement of some software these days. As I said I found the review phase harder than the writing phase because the deadlines are much more relaxed during the writing phase.

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Fabian Holzer

Hi Remo, first of all: Congratulations on your achievement!

I'm curious, could you provide a ballpark number on the total hours you put in over the course of your eleven month writing and editing process?

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Remo H. Jansen

Hard to say but it was very usual for me to spend a minimum of 1-2 hours per day (Monday to Friday) and 3-4 hours on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

That gives me a minimum of 484 hours:

(((1 * 5) + (3 * 2)) * 4) * 11 = 484

A maximun of 792 hours:

(((2 * 5) + (4 * 2)) * 4) * 11 = 792

It is also true that some weeks I took a break (e.g. Xmas) so maybe the number is a bit smaller. Let's say something between 400 and 700 hours per edition.

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Cat • Edited

Congratulations on becoming a published author! Also, thank you for such an in-depth article about your journey becoming a writer and posting the resources for those who are interested in taking that path. Having read that it got rid of your own Impostor Syndrome plague gives others another coping tool when the feeling flares up.

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Remo H. Jansen

Thanks! Happy to help others :)

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Jermaine

Congratulations on hitting that milestone Remo! Thanks for sharing your journey with us. Was not aware this form of Technical Review was a thing.

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Pierre-Henry Soria ✨ • Edited

Congratulations and thanks for this great and helpful article Remo!

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Periklis Gkolias

That was really inspirational. I will make sure I will read it, before I start writing mine :)

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Stephen Chiang

Big congrats on this achievement and thanks for sharing your lessons learned with us.