As readers may have surmised, when I write chapters/articles I tend to leave behind in my glorious epic works of perfection (well, that’s what Mr. Ego likes to call them ;) ) numerous grammatical, spelling and technical errors. It’s a flaw that persists because I proofread and QA my own writing and this is in strict opposition to the “many eyes” approach to QA. Self-reviewing only goes so far – once you are used to the text you wrote it becomes extremely difficult to see problems because you have the article/chapter and your own background concepts mingling. Errors get missed, technical foolishness escapes attention.

To rectify this problem I would like to ask for volunteer reviewers and proofreaders who can examine the final drafts of Chapters for the ZF Book “Surviving The Deep End” before they go live. This would be facilitated by offering unrestricted access to the private repository I version the book at (that way you can correct my failings and make me look godlike). When I say volunteer, I mean peanut paid monkeys – I don’t have the funds for decent fees but I will offer a prominant mention in the book’s credits and a once off donation of $50 to cover the cost of the electricity/generator cranking monkey used by your PC while reviewing. This should be a fairly light weight role – it’s not like I finish chapters every other day. Being a member of the PHP Blogosphere is obviously a serious advantage since I know the work and professional attitude of most people on my feed list.

In case you are unaware of where my money spinning tactic exists with the book, it lies in a dual donation/advertising revenue stream which is expected to be as predictable as the weather in Ireland. If the income exceeds my own costs I’ll put together some additional funds for reviewers/proofreaders. I expect to want no more than two technical reviewers/proofreaders which should be sufficient to keep me honest and free of major misteps.

In the third category, I am also inviting people who are interested in contributing specific topics chapters for the book. In my mind, these are highly specific chapters which address some nugget of utility that isn’t obviously provided by the Zend Framework itself but is useful to have in your toolbox. For example, my longstanding example had been using Zend_Feed to build a generic feed reader which is capable of interpreting feed formats without constant hand wrangling. Or perhaps there is a specific area of the framework I’m unlikely to use in a protracted project based book which you really want to write about. Or maybe it’s a practice related topic, like my Performance Optimisation appendix (no ZF strictly but necessary information for anyone building a generic application using the ZF). Yeah, like that’s NOT vague :) . If you have ideas let me know by email (padraic dot brady at yahoo dot com) or twitter (padraicb) message and we can discuss a chapter fee.

Now, back to those two chapters I intend having online by tomorrow…

Related posts:

  1. Zend Framework: Surviving The Deep End, Chapter 3 – The Model Available
  2. Zend Framework: Surviving The Deep End Report!
  3. Zend Framework: Surviving The Deep End – Performance Optimisation For Zend Framework Applications
  4. Zend Framework: Survive The Deep End – Still Kicking!
  5. Zend Framework: Survive The Deep End Update