Manning wants Zig books

News
1

I Heard Manning (book publisher) has been email carpet-bombing Zig contributors and community members, saying that they would find invaluable to have a conversation with people.

Since I keep getting notified that people are receiving those emails, here’s what they were interested in when I spoke with them in 2021:

  • Have somebody write a Zig book (at the time I told them it was too early)
  • Have somebody create an online Zig course for some kind of online learning platform they have (which I had never heard about before, so I assume it’s something they mainly aim at companies, maybe?)

That’s it.

If you were interested in writing a Zig book (or similar) and wanted publisher interest, then this might be a great opportunity for you, that said I personally believe this: A Note About Zig Books for the Zig Community | Loris Cro's Blog

To recap I would say this:

  • you don’t need a publisher permission to write a Zig book if you want to
  • a publisher might help you sell more copies of the book but that’s a calculation that you should make on your own (as they will take a cut of the revenue of course)

Also if you haven’t been contacted by them and really wish they did, I bet that if you grab an email address from their website and cold-email them, they will be very happy to talk with you, so don’t feel left out.

6 Likes
2

Thanks for sharing. For me, learning zig, is like pulling teeth. So I would love to buy some zig books to ease the pain. But because we are sub 1.0. There is nothing on the market. So it’s back to doing it the hard way. ie Trial and error with the occasional screaming of WHY? at the computer screen. It’s most inefficient.

Anyway

For a book to be successful, it has to be interesting. I was wondering what the community wanted, or thought useful. Please comment Dear zig community.

Perhaps rather than going “big bang”. It might be worth releasing a specific chapter, free of charge. People could comment and you would get valuable feed back. Too abstract?, Too simple or is the porridge Goldilocks right?

Personally I was thinking of writing a book on the stdLib, because it does change. Exciting. Taking my own advice I should concentrate on a specific area or namespace before committing myself to the project.

Which Namespace should I chose? Here is a list of all the zig stl namespaces.

array_hash_map, ascii, atomic, base64, bit_set, builtin, c, coff, compress, crypto, debug, dwarf, elf, enums, fifo, fmt, fs, gpu, hash, hash_map, heap, http, io, json, leb, log, macho, math, mem, meta, net, os, packed_int_array, pdb, posix, process, simd, sort, start, static_string_map, tar, testing, time, tz, unicode, valgrind, wasm, zig, zip

I will attempt to collate this into a concise document and release it as a PDF, for your collective amusement. I would prefer a small namespace, as I am lazy. But go with your gut.

All the best.

1 Like