Effective Modern C++ Status Report

In recent days, two major milestones for Effective Modern C++ have been achieved.  First, I sent a draft of the book's Introduction out for technical review. That was the last part of the book to be written, so I finally have a full draft manuscript. Second, I received an image of the book cover from my publisher, so I now know what the book will look like. My editor informs me that I'm the common crane, which elicited the same response from me and my wife: "common?!"

Working with O'Reilly is new for me. My past C++ books were published by Addison-Wesley, and my relationship with AW continues (both for past books as well as for books in my Effective Software Development Series). For Effective Modern C++, however, I concluded that O'Reilly was a better fit for me, and I'm quite pleased to be working with them.

A complete draft manuscript and a front cover design do not a book make. There's still a lot of work to be done, and I thought you might be interested in the schedule for it:

• Now until July 31: I revise the manuscript to take comments from my technical reviewers into account. I currently have over 70 reviewer email messages (some extremely long and detailed) waiting to be processed, and I expect that number to increase significantly by the end of this month, which is when I've requested that reviewers get me their remarks.
• August 1-15: I produce the book's index. This is my least favorite part of book creation, and I warn my wife well in advance that I'll be unusually irritating to be around during this time. Coming up with terms to index, including text rotations (e.g., "universal references, versus rvalue references," "rvalue references, versus universal references," "references, rvalue vs. universal") and page ranges is tedious, at best, and the tools available to get this information into a manuscript (e.g., into Microsoft Word, which is what I'm using) are primitive to the point of sadistic. There are professional indexers, but my experience (as well as that of other authors I know) has been that if you want a useful index for a book on C++, the content has to be created by the author. How practical it would be to have me identify the content and somebody else do the entry into the manuscript, I don't know. Index preparation is highly iterative, so the process would be more collaboration than hand-off, and my one prior experience with index collaboration did not go well.
• August 16-30: A copyeditor goes over the entire book, looking for errors and inconsistencies in grammar, spelling, style, labeling, and more. No matter how clean you think your manuscript is and no matter how many people you've had review it, getting it back from a copyeditor is always a humbling experience.
• September 1-5: I edit the manuscript one last time, taking the copyeditor's comments into account.
• September 5: I deliver a final manuscript to O'Reilly. 
• Early October: Digital versions of the book become available.
• Late October: Print versions of the book become available.

If you're dying to see what's in the book, and you don't mind dealing with a manuscript that's in draft form (and hence contains technical errors, awkward prose, Item titles in need of revision, primitive diagrams, confusing explanations, and, I hope, some stuff in decent shape), Effective Modern C++ will be part of O'Reilly's Early Release Program, meaning you'll have a chance to see the book in the same form as my technical reviewers. You'll also be able to offer comments on it. As things stand now, the book is slated to be available in Early Release form the week of July 7th.


And now, if you'll excuse me, I have hundreds of reviewer comments to process...

Scott