Writing a book is a sacrifice. It takes a lot of time, represents a lot of missed opportunities, and does not (directly) pay very well. If you do a good job it may pay back in good-will, but producing a serious book is a great challenge.
Nina Zumel and I definitely troubled over possibilities for some time before deciding to write Practical Data Science with R, Nina Zumel, John Mount, Manning 2014.
In the end we worked very hard to organize and share a lot of good material in what we feel is a very readable manner. But I think the first-author may have been signaling and preparing a bit earlier than I was aware we were writing a book. Please read on to see some of her prefiguring work.
- September 4, 2012 “On Writing Technical Articles for the Nonspecialist”
- September 19, 2012 “On Being a Data Scientist”
- October 11, 2012 “I Write, Therefore I Think”
- December 6, 2012 Good News: We’re Writing a Book!
Categories: Administrativia Expository Writing Opinion
jmount
Data Scientist and trainer at Win Vector LLC. One of the authors of Practical Data Science with R.