 All right, thank you for eating and listening this session. And let's get connected. My name is Alkin. I'm from Istanbul, Turkey. And I'm here to share some experiences about authoring a book. Hopefully I'll share the slides you can go through and contact me if you have any questions later on. I'm kind of known as DB here as my Nick. I've been in this business for a long time with the open source databases and also I have enterprise database backup. So I also like sailing and I do a bunch of time spent on the sailboat and this book is part of that. So it's kind of a work life thing that out of four chapters are written in this sailboat. So if you have any questions about the sailing, it would be a good discussion to have also. All right, this is where I work and we actually focus on Clickhouse Infrastructure Operations Net right now. And what does that have to do with MySQL, all the data comes from MySQL or Postgres. So there's a big link between the all app processing and the OLTP processing. So that's where my area is. Also it's an open source database. And what does it do? It's a columnar fast analytics cloud compatible database. And if you haven't tried it, maybe you can try it for the analytical workloads and ask questions for future reading or something like that. And so let's get to the book. The book is also here. It's a 1.6 kilograms. This book was written by Paul who is an Oracle employee and he actually didn't want to write the fourth edition. And this actually includes a developer and administrative chapters in it. So it's a mix and match. It's a solution base. Or at least cookbooks are solution based. So there's a problem and the solution type. Right now it's a 938 pages. I think that's what the book is. And this book took about two years to write and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. I can say that there's a lot of rewriting and reviewing goes on with these large chapters. It actually, what happens is when you actually rewrite when you go back after eight months of a chapter that you worked on, you may not remember what you wrote. So I also call to this book actually is a minuscule expert is known in the minuscule community and you can follow her Twitter and blog posts. She has a lot of talks about minuscule and minuscule troubleshooting. Things like that. She was the primary author for this book. So unfortunately she's not here. And then she says hi. So how do I know about this year? There's a 10,000 hour things and actually we walked into this building. This morning there's a 10,000 hour sign. It's more or less, it's a 10,000 hour thing. So it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. But maybe sometimes on the ceiling it takes 10,000 multiple miles to go. And then maybe on a motorcycle it's 10,000 kilometers to be master a skill. So it actually took me 10,000 hours to author a book. You need to have a luck to get a book published. I always wanted to author a book. But this wasn't my intention, like writing a technical book. I was kind of playing on a non-technical book. I've done some experiments and it took a pandemic to trigger this because there's nothing else to do in the free time. We were acting. So before that I authored blogs. You can check my blogs if you search Google. And I also attempted to write a booklet about like maybe eight years or 10 years ago. That also took me about like a year and a half to get. It was a mass-growing learning book, booklet. And then it got published. As a bit another, we'll talk about that. Authors from our ex-colleagues. And so I did invite many core authors. I've spoken to the people that who actually authored books with other publishers, but never got to that point. I've given a lot of talks globally and that helped me to be actually learning about the subject and the technology. And I always focused on the same open source databases for the last, let's say, a decade and a half. I go back a little bit more than that in my professional life, but previously I was on the enterprise side of the house. So it's about three decades of experience put together in this book. Someone was saying, including Svetan, my experience, we're like almost half a century of experience total to get to this book. So what are the stages of authoring a book when you actually get an invitation or a kind of mutually agreed to write? There's going to be an agreement. So it's like an envy like documents to be signed. A bunch of legal documents you actually sign. And this is basically nothing but a contract like you actually join a company. And then you have to agree on the table of contents, at least get the outline of it, what the chapters will be. Since this is the fourth edition, there was a requirement to change 60% of the book so that was the agreement, which was a problematic at the end, but we got it covered. So the other biggest challenge for me especially was the platform. O'Reilly has its own platform and it uses certain techniques to compile a book. So if you're not like very XML oriented person or don't have an HTML experience from the past, this might be a difficulty getting ASCII Doc or DocBook. It's not like you have a Word document or a text where you could just type everything and then copy and paste things. It doesn't work that way. I'll explain that a little bit more later. And then there's an editor's assignment. So you meet with one editor, you start working on it and then the editor may change on the way and that makes a little bit of a challenge. And then there's also supervisors that actually overlooks for the deadlines if you're actually meeting with the chapters that are. It's very commitment in the sense of like we do at work. So it's nothing but like reaching the goals in every quarter, reaching the chapters and finishing them and then packing them. But they go through other reviews later on in these stages. So you should start with the difficult chapters because easy chapters are easy to cover later on. What you should look for the most difficult chapters in the beginning because there's going to be some burnout along the way. So there's going to be a research time needed. Even though you know the subjects, you're not always academically qualified to put a statement in it. So you need to make sure that the information that we put in a book is correct before it even goes out to the technical reviewers. So technical reviewers are assigned from the authors asked to be by invitation and also publishing house like O'Reilly will also invite external technical reviewers which can actually be difficult to communicate because of the timelines when they get back to you. So you give a chapter after the technical review is done the other part of these technical reviewers may actually challenge or actually ask to make changes. So if you use the Grammarly for Grammar correction along the way so that you can actually go back and forth between editor as much as possible reduce that interaction with the editors. There's a review process is complicated. Since we work two editors, we read each other's work. Every time we actually complete the chapter section. Sometimes chapters are split. Most of the time Smith had vast knowledge of certain problems that she would actually then fix those. And I would just do the whole chapter or some of the chapters we would be split in between the two authors. And then there are the final edits before everything else goes. Those final edits are done by other editors or the reason is like it's a second set of eyes. It's another person reviewing your work. Editors work actually. So that's how it is. So how do we put all this together? We actually... is confirmed and then we get the reviews are done. Chapters also go through the quality assurance because there's a lot of console output. The console output don't fit. Because it's not an electronic version. There'll be two versions, one electronic and PDF, one on the portal and one in the printed book. So it has to be passing all those checks. Character sets. Things need to look normal when you're actually from your screen to when it goes. And then they all randomly come back with a feedback because all of us and they say, okay, this is more than 132 characters. You can't fit this. You have to split this up. You can't split everything up. Some of the output are large and long. And that was another thing to do. So the other thing is the bills. The bills are done on GitLab for O'Reilly. And basically you write them on XML or XML editor or write it manually on XML on VI. And then you push the code on GitLab. You check in. And then make sure there are no conflicts. If there are any conflicts or errors, it won't compile. Then you hit compile. And then you say to give me a PDF out of this. Sometimes it takes a long time. And then you wait for it to see what actually was typed in as that section or chapter or whatever change you made. So basically it's a cycle of, it's like pushing the code to a repo and I'm checking the output of what happened after that. So there is this cycle of reviewing, pushing, reviewing, pushing. Moreover, there is also the GitLab part. So O'Reilly uses GitLab for the compilation of the book. We use GitLab for the SQLs and the scripts, all the sample data sets. So everything that's on this book, in the SQL statement, even it's a simple select style form customer, has a SQL file in GitHub repo. So you can actually reforge that, look copy and paste and actually take an example or advance on it. So there is also the other part. Once you actually complete your GitLab part, you also have to go back and make sure that all the steps in each section are covered as a text file, as a SQL file in the GitHub repo. So you have to check that in. And again, compile, check it, make sure that everything works and no syntax errors. So the good part was on the syntax errors, we were on minus square 8. We mentioned this on the part of the book. So if you're using minus square 8 distribution, most of the syntax should work other than the latest updates that yesterday we went through some of those features. So the production schedule, after all that time, there is another production schedule. So this kicks in in the last six months of the book where we think that most of the reviews are done from internal and external technical reviews. There is the illustration. We have an illustration on the front page. This orally signs an animal of every book. These are embedded here species. So there's a little bit of writing about what animal is that and what the problem is. And basically we need to protect the nature. And then there's a lot of cleanup goes through. There's a quality control, one quality control, two goes back and forth and then make sure that everything is, is set and it looks professionally before it goes to press. And then it goes to sample press. You get like about 10 books of an example. And then you actually take a look at it, make sure that everything is spelled correctly. No, the correction was made after we submitted because editors go through it. And then sometimes auto correct and the spelling, some of those things can actually change. Sometimes you do find actually a minor character set encoding errors between the code because we use it at MySQL experimenting on the encoding character states and everything that there are some examples over there. So key takeaways from opening a book. One of them is talk to other authors like talk to me and before you actually jump from the gun. Do the platform research and make sure that you ask what platform I'm going to be writing. If you're collaborating, maybe Google talk type of, or verb type of thing might be useful and edit with the granular plugin. And you need to keep track of the process because in the larger books, it gets out of track very easily. And then also dedication of time. So this is done apart from our professional life, apart from our commitment to our work. A book is a book actually, you need to find and delegate a time of a blocks to write this like writing a blog post or anything like that you do as a site. You need to block. So I did early mornings, five to seven a.m. every morning. And the, you know, all the research I've done in that morning because there's no interruption. And then on the weekends, I, you know, spread at least two for our blocks whenever the time actually allowed. And so that's the work life and the book balance. It's, this is like a similar to doing a degree while you work and you have life, you have, you know, and other commitments and social life that goes on. All committing will kill and then it will cause other problems along the way. Again, it's a commitment. I also wrote a very detailed blog about the book and then there's a link. I'll share that. And we also had a more detailed, technical presentation of the book in Parkour University last November. So there's a YouTube recording of that also. A new book. Well, I wasn't actually planning to open a new book about a couple of weeks ago. I was on a conference in Pasadena and I got a book offer to write a database design and modeling for MySQL and Postgres. And I will be partnering with Ibrahim who is actually a Postgres expert so we can actually combine our forces to add to this book. Before coming over here, we have drafted our table of contents for this book. So this will start as early as this summer. So I will share the details with the blog post or some tweets. So what's in this book? We're going to get a chance to take a look at it. It's a problem solution. And then we come up with problems. And then describe the problem. Some of the problems are more complex than others. So in each section there are like over 200 recipes that says, okay, how do I do this? So if you're an electronic version, you can make a search about compression or some other technique, replication security, something that you are trying to figure out. Maybe there's an example. I wanted to talk about a special reference system for MySQL. This is new, updated version in MySQL 8. So one of the chapters we covered this with examples giving some, you know, like a SQL statements to use the reference system and then creating a sample table for point of interest and then inserting data that squares that and then we can create an index on the special system and then measure the distances between using the built-in functions and we have some of the functions that allows you to get that. And this is again MySQL 8's improved system that if you're actually on the location based services that's built into the database, you can actually now try that. And this is the book. And also there are three other books came out in literally same time frame. If you're learning MySQL, I recommend taking a look at, especially the learning MySQL. That was my original idea and the one that I wrote about booklet. The efficient MySQL is for more advanced and high performance MySQL is for the ecosystem. So how to get things done in the MySQL world with the proxies, you know backup recovery, scalability, charting and all that kind of details are in those books. So set of these four books will cover you most of the MySQL learning and that will help you get to the next level. And thank you very much. And I can take a question if there's any. Who's your curator in Postgres? Ibrahim Ahmed. Yes. Ibrahim Ahmed is a principal consultant. So we will be actually outing. We'll have more announcements once more details are coming up. Any other questions? Anybody wants to write a book? We need more books. So the pandemic era, there were some of gap. People actually didn't publish as much because there was less interaction and there were some of the older books had been kind of outdated like six, seven years old. There were more modern. As you know, both MySQL and Postgres are advancing every release and new features are coming out. There's more distributed databases are in the market. So there's an opportunity to don't think that this book was written. I don't need to write a book. That's not the case. There's always a new version like we had to spend two and a half years for a book that's on the fourth edition. So that means we cannot just sit and write a book. Any other questions? Are there students here? Students. Students. You get the book. So one quick update. I have donated from my book budget seven of them in the universities in Istanbul to students. After they've read them, they actually donated to their university. So I hope you actually take a look at it, read it and then donate it to your university and then so some other students can take benefit. For all the royalties from my part for this book will be donated to earthquake victims in Turkey. We had a major disaster about two months ago. So I've donated donations will be coming for all the royalties from my part for the earthquake victims for this earthquake victims. We have some sample books over here and we will be signing books. Please get in line as much as we are allowed. I want to share some of the books with you. Thank you very much.