Category: Nonfiction Books

General publishing announcements

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Some “Absolute OpenBSD 2/e” dates

No Starch intends to send AO2e to the printer on 22 March 2013. This would give a “bound book date” of approximately 12 April. Books would be in their hands roughly 19 April. They’re really good about shipping books to purchasers as soon as possible.

Note that DNSSec Mastery should be available in ebook form about then. Not only do I have two books coming in 2013, I have two books coming in April 2013.

All dates are subject to change based on the whim of the printer, phase of the moon, gasoline shortages, insurrections and iniquity and incivility, or any other reason whatsoever.

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DNSSEC Tech Reviewers Wanted

Last night, I finished the first draft of DNSSEC Mastery. If you’re one of my fans who wants to see the existing work, a pre-pub version is now available on LeanPub.

Now I’m looking for people familiar with DNSSEC on BIND to read the book and tell me where I’ve screwed up.

This book is for an established DNS administrator who wants to deploy DNSSEC. I assume you know what named.conf is, why you don’t put PTR records in a forward zone, and so on. The goal is not to get 100% of the people 100% there, but to get 90% of the people 100% there and ground the other 10% so that they can identify their own rough edges. (The idea is roughly similar to my SSH Mastery or Cisco Routers for the Desperate.)

The contents are:

    1. Introducing DNSSEC
    2. Cryptography and DNSSEC
    3. How DNSSEC changes DNS
    4. DNSSEC Resolver
    5. dig and DNSSEC
    6. Securing Zone Transfers
    7. KSKs and ZSKs
    8. Signing Zones
    9. Debugging
    10. Key Rotation
    11. Delegations and Islands of Trust
    12. DNSSEC for Data Distribution (needs better title, it’s SSHFP and TLSA)

Many of these chapters are short. Chapter 10 is not. The writing is rough, especially near the end.

So, if you know DNSSEC, and you’re interested in spreading the DNSSEC gospel, and you have enough time to read something about half the length of a short paperback novel, contact me via email at mwlucas at my domain.

I’d need any comments by 15 March. I plan to revise that week and get the book into copyedit, so it can be out for BSDCan. Barring any really appalling revelations from the reviewers, that is. I’d rather the book be late than wrong.

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Book status, 9 Feb 2013, and the Missing Contest Winner

Fast and furious progress these days:

Absolute OpenBSD: Peter has finished the tech edit on the entire manuscript. Chapters 1-18 are copyedited and returned to NSP. Chapters 1-17 are laid out and look somewhat like an actual book. (Seeing a book in laid out forces me to view it with new eyes. It makes me want to tear up the whole thing and start over. I know I can write better than that. But I think that both the publisher and you lot would lynch me if I delayed the book until 2016 for a proper rewrite.) I’m sending prepub PDFs out to various OpenBSD celebrities in the hope of getting blurbs for the front of the book. Best quote so far, from someone who will remain anonymous: ” It’s unfortunate that the strength of BSD man pages undercut his sales so much.”

DNSSec Mastery: I’ve made the second version available on LeanPub. It now contains everything you need to deploy DNSSec, provided nothing goes wrong and you don’t have to rotate keys. Plus, the introduction now gives you a reason to read the book, which is a bonus. (That last sentence originally read “The introduction no longer blows chunks.” And people say I can’t be tactful.)

To Ludovic ‘Ludy’ Simpson: You won the haiku contest. But you didn’t leave me contact info. Please get me your shipping address. Thank you.

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“DNSSec Mastery” in-progress version available

By popular demand (mainly on Twitter) I’ve made the work-in-progress version of DNSSec Mastery available on LeanPub.

This is an experiment. If it works well, I’ll do it again. If not… I won’t.

Why would you be interested?

    It’s cheap. I intend to sell the finished ebook for $9.99. The work-in-progress version is $7.99. I will continue to update the manuscript on LeanPub until it’s finished.
    Once the manuscript is complete, I’ll raise the LeanPub price to $9.99 to match other vendors.
    If you want to provide feedback on an incomplete book, this is your chance.

Why would I do this?

    I can usually get subject matter experts to review a book. I have a real problem with getting non-experts to review a book before publication, however. Non-expert feedback is important — those are the people most likely to catch when I explain something poorly, as opposed to the experts who already understand what I’m writing about. I can only handle so much feedback, so I wind up picking a select group of volunteers based on their apparent enthusiasm for the book. Measuring by the results, either I am a poor judge of enthusiasm or enthusiasm is the wrong measurement. This method might work better.
    I get paid earlier. That’s always nice.
    I want feedback from people trying to use it.

    Do I care what you do? No.

    In the long run, sales made via Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, or other ebookstores are better for my career. I’m expecting that only my most hardcore fans will buy the book early. If you’re a hardcore fan, but want to wait for the release of an actual book to buy it, I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t buy an incomplete book.

    But it’s here if you want it.

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Any interest in early drafts?

I have the DNSSec book about a third done, which isn’t bad for spending a week in the hospital this month, and am looking at various publication options. Once the book is finished it’ll be available in print, on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and hopefully iTunes. But I have an option for before the book is complete. LeanPub allows authors to upload works in progress, and update them as the work proceeds.

I’m pondering something like this:

  • Offer the incomplete book on LeanPub at, say, a 20% discount. Those of you who want to see it can, and those of you who want to send feedback can.
  • Update the book on LeanPub as I write.
  • When the book is finished, upload the final manuscript to all ebook platforms. Raise the LeanPub price to match. If you bought it earlier, you still get access, of course.

    • If you follow my blog, you’re probably a fan. I have no problem giving a discount to people interested enough in my work to follow my blog. And I might even get useful feedback.

    One of my goals is to reduce the amount of non-paying non-writing work I do. (Basically, I want to reduce my monthly recurring expenses, especially time expenses.) Updating a book as I write it isn’t a huge amount of work, but if nobody’s interested, I don’t want to bother.

    So: would anyone be interested? Or should I keep writing in my bubble?

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    Absolute OpenBSD 2/e Haiku Contest Winners & status

    I offered a haiku contest for the new Absolute OpenBSD. Winners got their haiku in the book, credited to them, plus an ebook copy of the book, plus a physical copy if I get enough physical copies and few enough winners.

    More people entered than I expected, a pleasant surprise. I appreciate everyone’s efforts.

    The winners are:

    Chapter 1:
    Josh Grosse: “Mailing lists are rough / Homework is mandatory / Love it or leave it”

    Chapter 3:
    Josh again, with “Straightforward questions. / Will you take the default prompts? / Think before you choose”

    Chapter 7:
    Ludovic Simpson, with “the root of all evil/ is never far from your touch / sudo saves your life”

    Chapter 12:
    Justin Sherrill, with: “My tunnel is now up/ I can do IPv6 / Me and three others” (needed slight edit for syllable count)

    Chapter 16:
    Josh Grosse again, with “Working behind scenes / taking care of vital things / the daemon is here”

    So, that’s three winners. I can swing three paper books.

    I had a lot of competition for certain chapters, others less so. Sending a network chapter haiku meant you went up against everyone, where submitting a haiku on the system maintenance chapter means you only went up against me.

    How did Josh get so many? Two ways. One, he submitted a haiku for every chapter. Two, I believe he was already familiar with haiku, and has read some of the classics. (Twitter doesn’t let me search old tweets easily, so I can’t be certain of that, but I’m pretty sure he’s the one I’m thinking of.) Josh actually inspired me to hold the contest with his Chapter 1 haiku.

    So, now that the haiku are ready, where is the book?

    Chapters 0-22 have gone through content editing. Two chapters remain.
    Chapters 0-17 have gone through tech edit.
    Chapters 0-14 have gone through copy edit.
    Chapters 1-6 have come back to me from layout. I have initial galleys to correct. They look really really nice — NSP always does a fabulous job producing books.

    The layout folks haven’t gotten the haiku yet, but needed to have something in that space. When I opened the draft I found:

    Here, a placeholder
    For a haiku still to come
    Replace at pages.

    The No Starch folks get it.

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    2013 Projects and 2012 Errata

    When you set goals for a year, you need to tell people about them. The potential embarrassment of having to admit failure helps you complete the goals. With that in mind, here are my goals for 2013:

    1) I will do three short technology books through my private label (aka “self-publish”). The first, on DNSSec, is underway. Some text exists, and I’m making copious use of scratch paper and whiteboards to figure out how to explain KSKs, ZSK, and the signature and key lifecycle in a coherent manner. (If you happen to have a good resource for this, please feel free to point me at it in the comments.)

    2) I will write & self-publish one novel. If I write nothing but nonfiction, my brain freezes up and the tech books become unreadable. If I’m going to write fiction anyway, I might as well release it. Attempting to traditionally publish a novel takes more time and energy than writing a book and will probably fail, so I prefer to spend that T&E writing. The odds of the book succeeding are negligible either way, so I’d prefer to do so in the least expensive manner.

    3) If I accomplish both of these early enough, I will continue writing. I will indulge myself in trying something that’s “just crazy enough to work,” like, say, “dc(1) Mastery” or “netstat Mastery.”

    Now here’s a leftover from 2012:

    Richard Bejtlich has reviewed hundreds and hundreds of technology books over the last ten years. For a time, he was one of Amazon’s Top 100 reviewers. Each year he posts a list of the best books he’s read, and gives one book the “Best Book Bejtlich Read” (BBBR) award. The award and $5 will get me a nice gelato.

    I’ve been on the top 10 list before, in 2007, for Absolute FreeBSD, and 2006 for PGP & GPG.

    2012’s BBBR went to (drumroll): SSH Mastery.

    This comes with some caveats, mind you. Bejtlich read and reviewed only one tech book in 2012, and this is his final BBBR award. I had no competition. But I’m okay with that.

    Bejtlich no longer reviews tech books, which I personally find disappointing. (I mean, how can I not like reviews that start start off with The master writes again? That’s the sort of thing I bookmark for those nights I get really depressed and start contemplating a shot of whiskey and a small handgun.)

    Life changes, however, and he’s working in other areas now, so: Richard, so long, and thanks for all the fish. I’m still putting that last quote on the cover of the DNSSec book, though.

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    Absolute OpenBSD pre-orders now available

    No Starch Press now has pre-orders for new Absolute OpenBSD. Order direct from the publisher, and get both the ebook and the paper for one price. If you use the coupon code ILUVMICHAEL you’ll get a discount, and I get a commission on the sale. (Bolded 20130207 because more than one person has said they missed that line.) If you use another coupon code, I still get paid, but not as much. I’m not deeply concerned which way you buy it, so long as you buy it.

    Here’s the cover of the new edition. It incorporates art from the first edition, plus a new background.AO2e Cover

    On a vaguely related note, I recently saw a link to my blog from a Chinese Unix users message board. Curious, I asked Google Translate what it said. It’s a discussion of the new book, which is awesome. Slightly worrying, though, is that in the translation they repeatedly refer to me as “Great God Lucas” or some variant thereof. I’m hoping that this is an artifact of translation, or some cultural thing I was previously unaware of.

    Otherwise, it would seem that I have a cult of worshippers in China, and that I must learn Chinese in order to issue my commands.

    Even more tangentially, links within a translated page take you to a translated version of that page. That’s pretty cool.