The Book of Sensu
A decision has been made: I am going to write a book!
I ’ve been playing with that idea for some time. After keeping a diary for nearly 10 years and writing a blog for one year, I thought it was about time to write a book.
Writing a book? About what?
It took a while to find a topic, but I finally made the decision: The Sensu Monitoring Framework.
But why a book?
Since I use Sensu a lot at work, I searched for more information beyond the Sensu project Wiki on GitHub and what I found via Google. I wanted a concise book, but couldn’t find one.
Learning by Teaching
There is another reason I want to write about Sensu: I ’m relatively new to it and far from an expert.
To teach something, you need to be proficient with it. By writing the book I will gain deeper expertise and, hopefully, be able to contribute to the Sensu project—documentation or code.
Bird by Bird
Writing a book seems like a huge task. Daunting!
I like a challenge and experimenting with ideas. Writing this book will be proof to myself that a book isn’t an insurmountable venture.
I ’ll tackle it “Bird by Bird”—piece by piece, little by little. In fact, I already started writing the book without realizing it by publishing the blog post [[2012-07-17 Provisioning Sensu with Puppet | “Provisioning Sensu with Puppet”]].
Everything that will appear in the book will first be published on my blog.
Agile Writing
I love the idea of self-publishing and of writing software in an agile way. Leanpub is the perfect partner to bring these together.
A few reasons I chose their service:
- Self-publishing freedom.
- The ability to release small chunks and get early feedback.
- They create your book in major formats (mobi for Kindle, epub for iPad and other readers).
- All rights remain with you.
- You can publish elsewhere and even sell a print version of your Leanpub-compiled book.
- The service is free; they only charge on a sale.
- Transparent pricing.
- Reasonable royalty fees.
- You can set the price or leave it to readers.
- It ’s quick and easy to set up.
- You can write the whole book in Markdown—no need for complicated text processors.
So, here it is: the official web presence of “The Book of Sensu”.
For now, you can do the following there:
- Leave your email address or subscribe to the RSS feed to be notified about updates.
- Indicate how much you would like to spend on this book.
- Leave a comment and tell me what you think.
Please go there and check it out. I would be very happy and grateful if you consider being a reader of my book someday.
Let me know what you think about me writing the book in the comments below or on the official page of the book.
Thanks a lot!
Done for today.