The contract is signed, the outline is in place, and the authoring team has had its first weekly conference call for the next member of the Inside Out family. Now all we need is some software to write about.
This is the unsettled part of the book-writing process, as the software coalesces to a point where it’s solid enough to document and we learn enough about its inner workings to write with confidence. Given the design goals of Windows 7 (no major architectural changes from Vista), that should mean we have plenty of low-level stuff we can write about based on the pre-beta release we brought home from PDC. We’ll need to wait for the beta release, though, to begin documenting how the new Superbar and other fun features work.
We’re not exactly sure when Windows 7 will ship, which makes the product planning cycle for Windows 7 Inside Out a little, um, shall we say, interesting? One rumor that still hasn’t been debunked says an “internal calendar” at Microsoft lists June 3, 2009 as the release date. If that’s the case, we’ll have a very busy beginning for 2009!
I guess it’s good news that I can’t find a single Windows 7 book listed as “coming soon” at Amazon yet. Something tells me that our fellow book authors are playing the exact same waiting game we are.
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
Please let us know as soon as it’s ready for pre-order.
Ed,
How exactly does one get into writing guides such as this? Where you approached for the first one and it followed from that?
Having not gotten your first book, I have to ask whether or not the book is more guide or guide plus development history.
I’m not immediately interested in a guide when I can tinker myself, but if it has the history of the OS being developed then I could shoot for that.
On that note, I wonder if I could convince Microsoft to do developers notes like Valve does for their games…
Joshua, you pretty much nailed it. Short version: A publisher aproached me in 1994 and asked if I wanted to write a book. That turned out to be the first of 30 and counting.
I’ll tell the full story someday…
Yert, no history lessons, it’s all hands-on stuff. We try our best to deliver insights and tips that you might not discover simply by tinkering.
Judged on my experience with the lack of an update to the Windows Vista Inside Out book when Vista SP1 was released and the A$1 now being about US$0.65, I will wait until the SP1 edition of the Windows 7 Inside Out book is released before purchasing. Cheers and best wishes..
From my experience as an IT Entrepreneur, i have huge collections of Ed Bott books, in fact for most OS and Office, this guy leaves no stone unturned and tries hard to simplify the process on the book to be easier to understand.
When i first bought Office 2007, it was a harder transition to learn from Office XP, i have now mastered it through Ed’s office 2007 books.
Also, i think Microsoft is just as excited about as everyone about Windows 7, Microsoft should at least invite or brief writers like Ed on what they are working on.
In fact i will pre order the book once it comes out, not to mention that i would be the first in line to collect Windows 7 once it comes out.
Also if you look at the content Ed gives away freely from ZDnet, even paid content dont have such richness and i remember a 5 part series that Ed has done on Vista and it was all free, i have high regard for Ed and he is a very intelligent guy.