So, uh, yeah, this book has been a long time coming. But it really is done. Here's a picture of me last week reading one of the first copies off the press:
I don't know what's up with Amazon's crazy talk of a 1-3 month shipping time. Pearson was set to deliver the books to Amazon this week (which is why the page changed from preorder to "add to cart"). One of the guys in my CocoaHeads got a notice yesterday that it would arrive by Wednesday, and then this morning saw it pushed back to May-June. Don't be surprised if that changes again in the next day or so, once Amazon gets their act together.
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Learning Core Audio is also available from the publisher's site, which also offers a paper + eBook bundle (the eBook is watermarked ePub and PDF).
And it's on the iBookstore, but only in the US and Canada. I'm told that Pearson is still working through the legal process with Apple Europe to get it up over there. And I got a tweet this morning reminding me that I need to check on availability in Australia.
And the final version is available to subscribers on Safari Books Online, where we've hosted the Rough Cut for the last year or so. And clearly a lot of people have been reading it there, because I keep seeing readers in the Core Audio forum on
devforums.apple.com using Kevin's CheckError() function to wrap all their Core Audio calls, like we do throughout the book.
So, that's the short story: any current delays you're seeing are temporary and caused by either incorrect status for the print edition, or contract and legal issues holding up eBooks in various countries.
The long story… why did this get pushed back so many times?
Well, that's a lot of things. When I came on to the book in early 2010, replacing Mike Lee (who was massively overcommitted to various pursuits and had to let something go), the book was already listed with a release date, even though Pearson's production process takes 3-4 months after the final draft, and Mike and Kevin just had a collection of fragmentary chapters and a couple code examples (all of which were worked into chapters 1-3). So that first date was hopeless anyways: if we'd worked 40 hrs/wk on it from January through June, we might have gotten a final draft done in the second half of 2010, which would mean that the book would have shipped in early 2011.
Obviously, that didn't happen. Two things: first, because of the difficulty of the material, Kevin and I decided to write all the chapters together, rather than working in parallel like most co-authored books do. That way, we wouldn't have radically diverging code styles, writing styles, etc., and would have all our eyes on the technical issues. The obvious downside of this approach is that you go half as fast.
The other thing is that writing is how I fill gaps in my billable client time. The fact is, writing computer books is completely impractical as a means of making a livable income. If you're writing for a big publisher, the royalty is in the 10% range, and Kevin and I are splitting that. Multiply that times what a niche title like a Core Audio book can be expected to make, subtract sales lost to people torrenting PDFs, and it's unlikely we ever out-earn our advance (which is about what I can make in a week of consulting… and my rates are a lot lower than many top iOS developers). I haven't attempted to divide the hours spent on Learning Core Audio by the advance I got paid, but it's probably lower than minimum wage. So, when I've got paying work, it comes first, and writing fills the gaps between gigs. Sorry, but that's how it has to be if I want to pay the mortgage and the health insurance bills.
So, as time was available between gigs, I pushed through the easier material in mid-to-late 2010, and then took a few weeks to really dig into Audio Units in early 2011. By this point, the Rough Cut was available on Safari Books Online, and we got good feedback from readers. I came into WWDC 2011 worried about languishing feedback and attention from Pearson, but they surprised me by putting the entirety of the first audio units chapter into a 900-page eBook sampler for WWDC attendees, and we resolved to finish over that (northern hemisphere) summer. I did the iOS chapter, then ended up doing more of MIDI than expected, and we were just about done in September. Then our editor surprised us by announcing that he was taking a job at Apple and leaving at the end of the year, so we crunched in November and December to incorporate all the feedback from tech reviewers and Safari, and get in a final chapter on Lion and (post-NDA) iOS 5, which mostly meant getting in AUSampler. Oh, and I was also crunched on a risk-tacular client project (parsing and highlighting PDFs on iOS) and the second edition of iOS SDK Development for the Prags at this time. So, if I was really pissy on Twitter in late 2011, now you know why.
In January and early February 2012, we did two error-fixing cycles, first on the Word docs (yes, really, that's what they use) and then on PDFs of the galleys. After that, it's all Pearson and their production process.
So, I'd rather it not have taken over two years to write -- most computer books that take that long get cancelled because their topics are no longer viable -- but it was a big project that was already going to take a lot of time, and time wasn't something I had a surplus of. But at least it's done now, and people who've read the Rough Cut or the eBook seem pretty happy with it. Hopefully as the shipping and legal issues get worked out, everyone who wants one will be able to get one in the next couple weeks.
—Chris