Publisher:
O'Reilly & AssociatesThis book was a bear. It's essentially a translation dictionary, so Mac users can look up a familiar term like alias and be told about the Windows equivalent, shortcuts. Like any good translation dictionary, it goes in both directions, so the second half of the book works in exactly the same ways for Windows users, look up shortcut, be told about aliases. It sounds so logical, and indeed it was when my co-author David Pogue and I were talking about the idea. But when I sat down to do the actual writing it required me to stretch in two ways.
Quite frankly, almost every part of this book project was an exercise in dental
extraction, but in the end, it was all worth it, since the book came out really well
(minus a few copy editing mistakes that slipped past David and me) and it's proven
very helpful to the people who've given us feedback so far. The only mistake we made,
I think, was in believing that we wouldn't need an index (who ever heard of an index
in a dictionary?). The problem is that entries can be quite long, which would have
made a page-based index a helpful alternative for navigating the book.
My other regret is that we were unable to win the argument with the layout folks
that it should be a "flipped book" with two covers, one for the Mac user
learning Windows and the other for the Windows user learning the Mac. It would have
been cool, and more important, it would have enhanced the usability of the book,
but it was just going too far with the elements that have to appear on front and
back covers.