Another long-term goal realized (sort of)

posted by pete on November 7th, 2008

I feel like death warmed over today, so it's nice to have something awesome to report on. I've been published in an O'Reilly book. You know, the ones with the cute animal covers.

There is little question that O'Reilly are still the authority on technical publishing. Sure, there are highly respected imprints like Pragmatic Programmers (who probably bought several ranches after releasing several versions of Agile Web Development with Rails) and companies like Apress that tend to stand well above the mediocre Que/Wrox/Sams/Norton/Dummies/Ziff-Davis/Pearson crowd. I suppose I should mention that Microsoft Press has had some major wins over the years as well.

Every young geek dreams of having an O'Reilly title with their name on it, due to the nerd cred that comes with it. Well, my buddy Jay Goldman just joined the club with the availability of Facebook Cookbook.

Back at MeshU, Jay asked me if I would write a recipe on advanced database optimization. This is amusing, as I can think of fewer topics that intimidate me more. Wanting to make sure that I had some expert input, I tapped Rowan Hick for review and input. He ended up contributing tons to the recipe, which spans several pages in a book full of page long topics.

Jay also wrote a very flattering bio for us, and seems to have really worked hard to make sure that he has a variety of people (such as Daniel Burka, of Digg/Pownce fame) chime in so it's not just a few hundred pages of Jay says this, Jay says that.

Congratulations, Jay!