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

Some labor over each detail in a draft and send me little bits with full detail. Others dash out longer bits less fully realized and send me sketches that they will later fill in.

The Life editors recently discussed that one of the challenges for an editor is looking at a work with fresh eyes. I was thinking about this when I followed a link from Daring Fireball to this movie of a New Yorker cover being created.

Take a minute to watch the movie. The artist captured himself drawing the cover on his iPhone. It’s mesmerizing to see the picture come to life. Over and over he draws a shape, adds color, and then starts to add detail. “Oh,” you realize, “that’s an umbrella.”

He starts with a fuzzy background that doesn’t look like much. By the end you realize it’s not supposed to. That it’s intentionally out of focus. It sets the context for the scene we are supposed to focus on. The people close to the camera are sharply drawn but are only shadows which don’t appear until nearly the end. In between is a hot dog cart with its umbrella. At the very last minute the New Yorker logo and the date are added to the top of the image and it’s a completed cover.

You can see a longer video showing some of the same evolution of a song in NPR’s Project Song. Here is a video of Nellie McKay composing a piece of music under a set of constraints. In this video you also get to see what she is going through as the song evolves.

Isn’t your reaction to the finished song and the completed cover different because you lived through their creation? I think you would have viewed the cover differently had you just seen an image of the completed cover. I am sure I heard the song differently before I saw this video. I have a different connection to these works.

With the books we edit, our goal is to try to think of you reading the books for the first time. But we know that our relationship to the work is different because we’ve come to know the author and we’ve watched and participated in the creation and polishing of the work.

This post originally appeared in the Pragmatic Life blog.

Having such a clear mission helps us make decisions every day. When someone proposes a book we can measure it against this standard. When an author and editor start shaping a book they can use this standard to guide the direction. There are plenty of good books with different goals, but this focus is one of the things that distinguish our books.  As developers struggle to meet the challenges at work, how can we make their lives better?

More than two years ago Dave, Andy, and I began talking about a series that would answer the question “But what about the rest of their lives?” Most good developers we know have interesting hobbies and outside interests that they attack with the same curiosity and passion that they bring to their work.

So we asked what a photography book would look like if the prags would publish it. It wouldn’t be a tour of all the knobs and buttons and settings on your camera. It would be a journey that would take the reader from where they are to becoming a better photographer. We would talk about light and composition. Not in a theoretical hard-to-apply sort of way and not in a you-wouldn’t-understand-this-just-do-what-we-say sort of way. We would have an experienced photographer and teacher lead you on a path where you start noticing things you weren’t aware of before.

For the first year of this project, the series was referred to as the “Get a Life” series. That had a nice ring to it but we thought it was kind of insulting. It implied that the readers didn’t have a life. But you do. You are some of the most interesting people we know. We love hanging out with you and swapping stories. And this is what helped us to start focusing our vision.

About a year ago we dubbed the new series “Pragmatic Life” and began signing and working with authors. Two of the books are in final review and another two are close behind so we wanted to start talking to you about what we’re trying to do.

We have the same goals for the “Pragmatic Life” series that we do for our “Pragmatic Bookshelf” series. They should make your life better. They will be told by authors who respect you and want to take you on a journey. They’ll be books that we want to read too.

Dave and Andy have been through this before, but this is the first time I’ve been involved in launching a new series. I’ll blog a bit here about everything that happens from the time we sign a book to the time we take it to market. I look forward to your feedback. As with everything we do, this is an Agile enterprise and you get to help steer.

Thank you and Happy New Year,

Daniel Steinberg

Pragmatic Life, Series Editor

This post originally appeared on the Pragmatic Life blog.