An Introduction to Fastware!

All my blog entries to date have been about issues related to authoring: things that affect my choices among writing tools and my strategies for effectively conveying the information I want to get across to my readers. (As I've noted before, the term "reader" is misleading, because one of the forms in which I'd like Fastware! to be usable is audible. The proper term is probably "content consumer," but I'll stick with "reader," in part because it's a lot less ugly, in part because it better reminds me that I'm primarily writing for humans, not machines.) This blog entry is a bridge between authoring concerns and content issues, because it touches both.

Experienced authors and publishers will tell you that you usually write a book's introduction last, because you can't really know what needs to be introduced until you've written it. When working on my past books, I used the placeholder introductory chapter as a dumping ground for terms that needed to be defined, assumptions that needed to be explained, conventions that needed to be described, etc. When the book proper was done, I'd go back and sift through the debris that had made its way to what was to become the Introduction, take a deep breath, and do my best to make a coherent narrative out of the odds and ends I found there.

For Fastware!, I chose a different approach. My experience has been that the need for a book on how to write software that runs quickly is not self-evident to many people. That bothered me. I view the case as overwhelmingly strong, and I felt compelled to make that case right away. As a result, I wrote Fastware!'s Introduction first, and I've now made a draft available at the book's web site. In its current form, the chapter is more manifesto than Introduction, and I know I'll have to add more material once I've written the rest of the book, but it should give you a good idea of what I envision the book to ultimately be.

There are two parts to that vision, content and presentation, and the Introduction should give you a glimpse of both. (If you've been following this blog, you know that I believe that content and presentation are not really separable. If you haven't been following the blog and are interested in this view, check out this and this.) The content should be self-explanatory. If it's not, I've botched my job, and please let me know about it, either as comments on this blog or as email to smeyers@aristeia.com.

Regarding the draft presentation, here are a few things I think worth pointing out:

• The book is about speed, and visually, it should come across that way. One way I've tried to convey this is the use of italics in the chapter title, section and sidebar heads, and the footer. Like runners striving to move faster, italic letters lean forward. Another way is the fireball behind the chapter numbers. This is cheesy in its current form, but I have no illusions that I'm an artist; the fireball is a placeholder. My original idea was to have flames shooting out the back of the page numbers, and I'd ultimately like to do something more like that. Another problem with the fireball is that it's too prominent, but that can be toned down in various ways (e.g., increase the transparency of the image). The main thing is to come up with subtle ways to suggest movement -- fast movement -- through the book's layout and formatting.
• "Voice of Experience" sidebars reinforce material in the chapter they accompany. This is one of the ideas for Fastware! I'm particularly enthusiastic about, and it straddles the line between content and presentation. The book will contain lots of suggestions about how to write fast software, and after a while, I expect readers to roll their eyes and mutter, "Yeah, yeah, yeah..." Some of the suggestions may strike some readers as less important than I know them to be, and I worry that such readers will skip the muttering and simply roll their eyes.
  
  Some authors, to reinforce the points they make, offer fictional examples demonstrating how things could play out in practice. Other authors give real examples from their own experience. Few authors have the background to personally vouch for the full range of topics I'll cover in Fastware!, and, alas, I'm not one of them. The "Voice of Experience" sidebars are my way of bringing in guest speakers who, in their own words, can back up what Fastware! tells them. My plan is to have two sidebars per chapter, although I currently have only one in the draft Introduction.
  
  The sidebars are designed to have a different look to them, and not just to make it clear that they are sidebars. For readers reading straight through, I want them to pop up from time to time as visual and semantic treats. For readers flipping through the book, I want them to stand out as easy-to-find nuggets that stand on their own and provide useful "from the factory floor" information.
  
• Color output is the default. Especially as time goes on, I expect more and more readers to experience Fastware! on a color-capable device, so the primary presentation format should take advantage of color. In the draft Introduction, I sometimes use color to bring out semantics (e.g., for clickable URLs and email addresses, although they are not active in the PDF I posted, sorry). In other cases, I use color simply to make the work more visually engaging. Some will pooh-pooh this use of color, but it has as great an impact on a prospective reader's evaluation of a book as do things like font choices, interline leading, footnotes vs. endnotes, etc. Black electronic text on a white electronic page looks as anachronistic to contemporary readers as black and white TV shows do to contemporary TV viewers. In my draft introduction, I use color in a number of ways to enliven the visual effect: for section headers, for bold-faced text, for sidebar backgrounds, in the line above the footer, in the page number fireball, in "The Voice of Experience" photographs. My goal is to produce a book that looks somewhat less like a traditional book and somewhat more like magazines and web pages.

If you have any comments on my vision for Fastware! (content or presentation) or about the draft Introduction, please let me know, either as comments on this blog or via email to smeyers@aristeia.com.