Thanks largely to the success of my Learning the Yii Framework series, people are often asking me about my plans to write a book on Yii. Writing a book on Yii is something that I’ve been meaning to do for some time, but have been way too busy for the past couple of years to make it happen. Every so often I post something about the phantom Yii book, and so here’s another. This time, it’s pretty good news…
As for my schedule, I’m now writing the third edition of my “[intlink id=”3168″ type=”post”]PHP 5 Advanced: Visual QuickPro Guide[/intlink]” book. That project will take the next couple of months, through June. I’m hoping it will be entirely done (rewrites and all) in early July. I think I’ll have a decent-sized Web project to do in the fall, but other than that, I have no deadlines and obligations for the latter half of 2012. Little things will no doubt come along, but this kind of free time is unusual for me. (And, strangely, isn’t frightening at the moment, although free time come January could be a problem!) So, reasonably speaking, I will be able to work on the Yii book full time as of August 2012. This should coincide nicely with the hopeful release of Yii 2.0 over the summer. Speaking of which…
I’ve been chatting with Qiang Xue, the creator of Yii, and he has graciously offered to act as the personal tech editor for the book. This is a great honor to me, and will be a wonderful asset in making sure the book is as technically accurate as possible. In return, I’m going to help with some of the official Yii documentation (it’s the least I can do). And the good news keeps rolling in, as Alex Makarov, author of the popular Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook (Packt Publishing), has generously offered his assistance, too. These are invaluable pieces that are coming together nicely here.
In terms of publishing, my current plan is…
- To self-publish an ebook only. I will release it in mobi, epub, and PDF formats, without any annoying Digital Rights Management (DRM).
- Possibly no DRM.
- Probably no DRM.
- The price would be about $15 (USD).
- People would be able to buy the book in advance, and get each chapter as I write it. Revised chapters would be free updates.
- People would be able to buy just a single chapter and get revisions of that chapter as free updates.
I’m assuming that I’ll create a separate Web site for the book, as I’m also planning on making some of the book’s content freely available in HTML format. This does mean that along with writing the book, I’ll have to create the Web site and the above functionality, but such are the costs of doing things yourself. And I happen to know of a framework that makes Web development a lot faster…
I’ll continue posting updates here and on Twitter (by the way, I’m on Twitter @LarryUllman) as I have them. Yii postings may be sporadic for the next couple of months as I focus on the PHP Advanced book, but rest assured the Yii book is happening.
All thoughts, feedback, input, and offers of money are most welcome!
