Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: New (not yet released) P6 book?

dona_ferentes opened this issue on Jul 02, 2005 ยท 14 posts


mickmca posted Sun, 03 July 2005 at 9:54 AM

Wishlisting Denise's book. I'm reminded, though, of another thing to be wary of. Book publishers want their books out the day the software hits the street. That's impossible, and you can use how quickly the book appears as a rough metric of whether it's any good. In addition to the time required to edit and polish the book, even if the writer has produced it in a 30 ppd white heat, there is the physical process of idea to bound paper, which takes a month or more, done correctly. So a book that appears a few months after software release was probably written and in production when the software shipped. The notorious P# Handbooks were extraordinarily crude in this respect. The P5 one came out two months after the software release, and it contained no meaningful information about innovations in P5. The illustrations didn't even use the new P5 figures, and there were places in the manual where features were explained in meaningless gibberish, all repeated dutifully in Mortier's text. It was obviously thrown together to be "first out" and exploit the "I'll buy anything" crowd. Writing a book takes a long time. If the writer doesn't have access to the software early in the beta phase (as I'm sure Denise T did, though that's just a guess), there is no way he will produce a competent, useful book within weeks after software release. Fortunately, P6 doesn't represent the radical change the P5 did, and the writer can bootstrap the book a bit by writing about P5 and then revising. That said, enough time has passed between first beta and today to allow Denise to produce a worthwhile book, and I'm confident that it will be a good one.