More JIRA book news

The breaking news is that I just signed an agreement with O'Reilly to produce another book. The working title is "Practical JIRA Development" and the scope is JIRA administration and plugin development, just like this blog.

It's part of O'Reilly's push towards realtime publishing so it will be sweet and short. As Mike Loukides noted:

"We're looking for manuscripts that are roughly 30-70 print pages long"

The book will be written in DocBook and committed to a repository with automated builds of the book. Nice and agile!

Why isn't there a JIRA book?

People occasionally ask me why I haven't written a book about JIRA. I wrote Practical Development Environments for O'Reilly a few years ago and enjoyed doing so. I have lots of ideas for what would make a good book about JIRA. So what's the problem? Well, here's the gist of a reply I sent to a publisher recently:

I'd love to write that book! My problem is that I don't want to spend a year working 8pm to 2am for minimal pay.  That's horribly destructive to family life. Nowadays I'm in a consulting position where I could probably do it as a day job in around 6 months, but who's going to pay me to do that? Atlassian might consider it taking it on as marketing expense but my understanding is that what it would cost them is far larger than what they might ever expect to make.

My sense is that technical books are created because their authors felt "it just needed doing" or "because it's there", but not for rational financial reasons. Yet if this blog ends up containing a useful number of articles I wouldn't object to publishing them as a book.