A Question
Shortly after the European PowerShell Conference and the PowerShell and Devops 2018 summit in the USA Mike Robbins b | t contacted me with a question.
Interested in writing a chapter in a PowerShell book?
A Conference in a Book
The book is designed as a conference in a book where each chapter is written independently with content similar to what you would present in a 45 minute presentation.
That’s a neat idea, people who couldn’t come to one of the conferences would be able to get an experience a little bit like attending a conference but in book form.
OK there would be no networking, evening entertainment or instance responses to questions but a bundle of useful information that you can take with you and read anywhere.
It’s All For Charity
(I hope older UK viewers read that in this voice 
)
)The bit that clinched it for me was this though
We’re donating all of the royalties from the book to the DevOps Collective Scholarship program https://leanpub.com/causes/devopscollective.
All the money raised by buying this book will go to the DevOps Collective OnRamp Scholarship program.
This scholarship provides
- ticket to PowerShell and DevOps Global Summit OnRamp track specifically designed for entry-level professionals
- five nights lodging
- domestic airfare
- buddy programme
Fabulous Editors
So I said yes.
I then had to sit down and write some words. I wrote about how we created dbachecks, the challenges we faced and how we overcame them.
One of my biggest challenges was writing in the wrong English! The book is written in American English and there are zeds where there should be esses and missing u’s in words! My spell checker was covered in red squiggles! The second challenge was getting the code to fit the column limit for the book. I show a lot of the AST code that we use to validate that dbachecks code will work correctly and it doesnt split to 80 characters very easily.
Luckily I had 3 wonderful, patient editors to help me with all of this. Mike Robbins , Michael T Lombardi and Jeff Hicks each helped me to make the chapter read more fluently, make sense and be spelled correctly!
Thank you very much you three for all the work you have put into this book.
Help Yourself and Others
If you want to attend a PowerShell conference in book form, want 30 chapters of fabulous PowerShell material and want to help grow and diversify our industry then look no further you can get the book here
You can also find all of the authors twitters and websites below, You should go and see what they are sharing there as well.
Thank you to Mike Robbins, Mike Kanakos and Rob Pleau for having all the links below already handy in their blog posts at the time of writing this!