grumble

Have exchanged some more mail with Chuck. He wants someone to write about two-thirds of the book. As someone else at ORA once said, Mac OS X is really just FreeBSD Unix with plastic no-slip bathrub flowers stuck all over it. So, the Terminal command reference and all will just be a dance remix of previous books on that topic (cat or even emacs looks and works on OS X exactly like it does on Linux); he needs a writer to cover all the stuff specific to OS X.

Going to see if I can't meet with him today. I spent some of the weekend messing around with Project Builder, Apple's development IDE that comes with OS X. It really is rather impressive. I'm curious how deeply he'd want me to get into programming for the OS. I'd love the excuse to learn C for real, of course. Actually, prog, consider: where I'm headed later this year, be it another job or grad school, knowing C can only help me.

Hum. Well, I dug up my copy of Kelley and Pohl's "A Book on C" yesterday. Guess I'll go get some coffee and start in on this a second time, taking Project Builder for another spin at the same time.

I wonder why Chuck thought of me for this project. My glomming onto OS X was well-known in the company after I got my iBook and started blubrling about it on internal mailing lists, of course. However, there are definitely other OS X-using writers on ORA's radar, and I was imagining that I ruined my chances of writing more after "Perl & XML" because of my open whininess about it (sometimes); it's a sure thing that Chuck spoke with Linda before coming to me, and she apparentlly did not suggest that he find someone else for it. This boggles me, to be honest. But: shrug. Let's see what happens, hm?

Okay, then.

Backed by unanimous opinion of friends and family, I verbally agreed to take on the book today. Here we go. Chuck lent me a couple of other books to read as homework, along with my assignment to spruce up the outline draft he's already made.

I asked for the story leading up to his tapping me for this, and heard lots of fun history and politics about this corner of the ORA machine. Beyond being unseemly of me to describe it in a public venue, it would probably bore you. (And if you're a close friend you're doomed to hear me bring it up at some point anyway.) As to why he chose me in particular, he knew I was a Mac user and a blathersome hacker and had some free time on my hands, but more interestingly, I seem to be the second choice -- the first prospective author didn't want to go into any of the underlying Unix stuff at all, which is, really, the Wrong Answer. Curiously, this particular author had written the O'Reilly book that got me back into programming, many years ago. So turns the wheel, la la.