wigglywonk

No.

I would pretend that I was seriously considering it, and then would find something that was nearly as good and never come back.

cf. Salon.com (despite the fact that it went free years ago)

Skip the book. Find, read, and 'do' a few online tutorials, and you'll know over 90% of what you need to get going. Pick one specific to your engine of choice (MySQL in this case, it seems) and just go with it.

The old ESPN site was just god-awful. This new one is better. I'll still probably never visit, but at least now I'll call it that "less awful site I never go to" instead of that 'horrible horrible site I never go to' :-).

Gandi.net ... Not the cheapest, but reliable as hell and not based out of the US.

I still have those 5 chapters of that first "book" I never wrote. I like to go back and look at them every once in a while -- they're not great :-P.

I actually wrote some 150 pages of a first (technical) book before sending out proposals to 10-15 publishers to which I received a resounding ... nothing. I think maybe one rejection.

After a year of feeling a little bummed about it, I tried again, this time pre-clearing topics with the publishers and got a proposal accepted.

But the advice that stuck with me is to just write. Sure, plan out what you're going to write ( topics + sub-topics for non-fiction, storyboard for fiction), but otherwise, just let the words flow. You're going to butcher the crap out of it later on when you start editing it anyway, so don't _start_ by worrying about it.

Just start writing, using whatever works best for you. I've been using TextEdit on the mac a lot lately for my writing, but anything's good.

If you're writing for a publisher, then they're going to give you a template that's probably for Word, and you don't have to worry about complicated document struturing stuff -- they'll help with the referencing, etc.

If you're doing it all yourself, then a document description system such as LaTeX might be the way to go. If I was writing a technical book that i knew had little chance of being published, I'd probably use that.

Firefox is a -beast- on the mac. It drags and constantly seems to be using 5% of CPU, doesn't do fonts right, and hangs and lags a lot. So, i use Safari about 80% of the time.

However, it's got a lot of great plugins, so I use it for any questionable stuff and for proxied traffic, etc.