I love days like today. We don’t get to do much real-time publishing in the book world. We don’t have much in the way of breaking news that meets the constraints of writing, editing, and publishing books. It takes me back to my days in radio news or in writing for and editing web sites. There’s a bit of a rush.

While I’m working with other editors to launch this Pragmatic Life series, I’m also still editing books on our technical side. One of them is the Pragmatic Programmer’s book on the iPhone SDK.

Back in March we were getting ready to ship the book. We were back from tech review and were busy polishing the prose when Apple announced iPhone 3.0. 

We had a decision to make. People were getting antsy that our Beta process was taking so long, but if we shipped the book as it was, the print edition would be coming out just about the time Apple was releasing iPhone 3.0. 

So we decided to go underground.

Chris and Bill started writing material for the upcoming version of the iPhone SDK. Because of the NDA, we weren’t allowed to show anyone this new material until Apple released the new version of their software. 

Last Monday the three of us were in the audience at Apple’s keynote for developers at WWDC 2009 when they announced that today would be the day. The guys cranked it into overdrive and tested their code against the new version and revised chapters where the landscape had changed. We already had four additional chapters and a fifth was added last week during the conference.

The Prags provide us with great tools for collaborating and pushing out electronic versions of our book that can be read on the iPhone or Kindle or as a downloadable PDF. So we’ve got the book all ready to go live and to send it to tech review.

We’re just waiting for Apple to push iPhone 3.0 so we can share the latest beta of this book with you. Refreshing their page. Waiting. Refreshing.

We’ve got a release pegged to a news event. I love days like today.

This post initially appeared in the Pragmatic Life blog