Do you read Raymond Chen's blog? You really should. Like so many of the blogs I read these days, it is also going to be available as a book.

Ryamond says:

Luckily, I found a sympathetic ear from the folks at Addison-Wesley Professional who were willing to take a chance on my unorthodox proposal. But I caved on the length, bringing it up to 500 pages. Actually, I came up with more like 700 pages of stuff, and they cut it back to 500, because 700 pages would take the book into the next price tier, and "There isn't enough of an audience for a book that big!"

Eighteen months later, we have The Old New Thing: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows, following in what appears to be the current fad of giving your book a title of the form Catchy Phrase: Longer Explanation of What the Catchy Phrase Means.

It's a selection of entries from this blog, loosely organized, and with new material sprinkled in. There are also new chapters that go in depth into parts of Win32 you use every day but may not fully understand (the dialog manager, window messages), plus a chapter dedicated to Taxes. (For some reason, the Table of Contents on the book web site is incomplete.)

Oh, and those 200 pages that got cut? They'll be made available for download as "bonus chapters". (The bonus chapters aren't up yet, so don't all rush over there looking for them.)

This is a kind of trend really - many writers have put energies into blog posts instead of books, only to look up and discover that some of the posts, rearranged into an approrpriate order and with a little writing to connect them, make a pretty cool book. It's not clear whether it will be out in time to ask for it as a Christmas present, but it would be a cool way to use any booky gift certificates people give you.

Kate