Ali's Book - Programming in D - Delivered

[Ali Çehreli]

On 9/16/21 10:06 AM, Ron Tarrant wrote:
 > My copy of Ali's book just came. Holy crap, it's thick!

Sorry, not very practical as a replacement for watching towels. ;)

 > It's never obvious how much effort goes into a work like this until one
 > can hold it in one's hands and leaf through. I'm humbled.

I got curious myself and checked: The first mention of drafts of 
chapters is from July 24, 2009; right after I learned about D and 
started a Turkish site:

   https://forum.dlang.org/post/thread-20-post-132@ddili.org

(None of the links to drafts in there are live anymore.)

Then I started translating the existing ones to English (as well as 
writing new chapters), which I announced sporadically. For example, here 
is the one about 62% completion in September 16, 2012:

   https://forum.dlang.org/post/k33s7g$29rr$1@digitalmars.com

Here is the announcement for 100% translation in July 24, 2014 (to the 
day of the first Turkish draft announcement!):

   https://forum.dlang.org/post/lqqf2l$b1u$1@digitalmars.com

I continued working on it after the translation was finished. I think 
one of the last chapters was Operator Precedence, which was in August 
15, 2015:

   https://forum.dlang.org/post/1468.11272@ddili.org

After some loss of motivation, I am slowly getting back to improving the 
book. For example, I went to a coffee shop today to improve the 
Immutability chapter. (Nothing published yet.)

One of my favorite anecdotes about the book is Andrei telling me that 
Scott Meyers liked the format of the book was curious who did the 
formatting. It's been all me! :) DDOC generated HTML pages with the help 
of CSS and passing all that through Prince XML to produce a PDF, which 
is the ultimate format that goes to the printers. (And Calibre for the 
ebook versions.)

Ali