You’ll already have read, or be about to read, similar blog posts from Remko and Peter, I imagine, here’s my take:

Remko Tronçon, Peter Saint-Andre and I are writing a book on XMPP for O’Reilly, with a working title of “XMPP: The Definitive Guide”, expected to hit the shelves (and hopefully fly off them soon after) early 2009.

If you’re wondering how things like this come about, the story goes something like this:

Every so often, someone comes into the Jabber Development room, and asks if there’s any getting started documentation, or they ask if there’s a decent book, or they ask if there’s a guide to what Jabber/XMPP can do for them as a developer. For some reason, it seems to usually be me that ends up letting them know that there isn’t really, unless you want to go and read the RFCs, or the XEPs. I got the daft idea that writing such a book would be helpful, so I poked Remko and asked if he was interested in co-authoring something if O’Reilly would publish it - he was, so off we went and did very little for quite a while. As it happens, O’Reilly were interested in publishing a book about XMPP; realising an XMPP book wasn’t an XMPP book without Peter, we set about persuading him that joining us in the venture was a Smart Thing™, and things started moving.

We met up for a pizza at FOSDEM in February, hashed out where we wanted to go with the book, wrote out the overview, sent it off to O’Reilly, who didn’t hate it, and started writing.

Since then, we’ve made some decent progress on it, and also found out that writing books is hard work (even given that each of us has written at least either a doctoral thesis or RFCs). Still, we’re chugging along and things should be really taking shape in the next month or two
The rest will, someday, be history — we’ll post an update later when we’re closer to the inevitable fame and fortune.

Categories: Jabber