Today I published my first book, “The HTTP/3 Book”!
This book is the latest incarnation of things I’ve produced relating to HTTP/3. The first was a conference talk I first gave at ConFoo 2024 in Montreal. That went down pretty well, and I was asked to do the same talk at the International PHP Conference 2024 in Berlin. The room was so packed for that talk that they have asked me back to do the same task again at IPC Munich 2024 later this year!
S&S Media, the German company behind IPC, publishes lots of magazines for developers, and I was approached by their representative in Berlin about writing an article on this subject. So after a little negotiation (particularly about rights!), I sat down to turn my talk into an article. This was made quite easy given the framework I had from my talk, but I was pretty pleased and surprised to be able to crank out a decent 4,000 word article in a bit over 2 hours. It’s not been published yet, but I’ll amend this post when it has.
I’d enjoyed writing this article so I wondered about expanding it into a short book. Asking around on Mastodon suggested that the easiest way to go was self-publishing on Leanpub; I didn’t want to get pulled into writing some monster tome for a publisher.
It took about 2 days of writing, plus another day or so learning the ins and outs of the Markua markup format, tweaking, proofreading (thanks to my mum!), drawing diagrams, and building a site to demonstrate the difference in network activity across different HTTP versions.
A week on from my first thoughts of doing this, I’m very happy to find myself with a freshly published 54-page, 12,000-word book! I’ve of course publicised it across all my social media, but need to put a bit more effort into marketing, perhaps look into Leanpub’s translation services. Anyway, we will see how it goes, but it’s been a good experience so far.