Hi . If you're reading this then you're probably one of the many kind people who have bought one of my books in the past, and you're probably wondering, "where the heck are the last two volumes of the Mastering Windows Server 2008 series?" In short, their delay is my fault and so I've asked Sybex to re-arrange things a bit. In brief, we are
Why are the two volumes being folded into one and arriving so late? As with so many other things in life, chalk it up to money. For good or ill, computer books of all kinds just don't sell as they once did. Ever since 1994 I've turned out books on Windows networking with the help of various co-authors and, thanks to you folks -- my readers -- they've remained the best-selling books of their kind, something for which I am very grateful. Despite their top sales spots, however, my income from writing them has dropped to about a tenth of what it was seven or eight years ago. You see, that's not due to anything about my books in particular, as every technical author that I know has been seeing the same trend over the years. Tech books don't sell as well because, I'm guessing, is that the computer industry isn't growing as quickly as it did ten years ago, and because there is such a wealth of information available for free on the Internet: ask a search engine a question, and you can get millions of answers. Thus, I've had to spend more time consulting and teaching to pay the bills (I still can't believe that the electric company won't take signed copies of my books as payment!), leaving less time to write, and so the book got later and later.
To handle this, I asked Sybex if we could trim out some of the chapters so that we could combine the remaining text into one book. It was difficult to choose things to remove, but I got the whole thing down to what I think will end up at about 1200 pages -- big, but only about two-thirds the size of the 2003 book, and so still manageable reading-wise. I mainly trimmed chapters that addressed interesting but second-order subsystems or chapters for which we'd found it essentially impossible to find co-authors to cover. I really think that the resulting book is actually a bit tighter and flows better than the original plan, but I'm still hopeful of getting those gone-for-now chapters into a future book and/or cover them some in future newsletters.
The book, named Mastering Windows Server 2008 R2, will appear on the shelves in January 2010. Again, I sincerely apologize to you, my readers, for the delays and I hope you understand.
Meanwhile, I've finished most of the writing that I'm doing for the Server 2008 book -- the rest of the work's up to the co-authors -- and so now I'm immersed in the new Windows 7 stuff -- Windows 7 desktop and Server 2008 R2. It's the fastest concept-to-disk version of Windows I've ever seen, meaning that I don't have as much time as I normally do to analyze it before it ships, so I'm working long hours picking apart with this latest Windows.
And you know what? I find I'm pretty jazzed about Win 7/R2. Yes, the reason why Microsoft's creating and releasing a new version of Windows so quickly is to address the fact that many people hate Vista, but who cares why they're doing it? All I know is that as far as I can see, it's mostly pretty good news.
The new desktop OS is a nice upgrade equipped with things that both IT pros and regular old users will like. For example, users will find that the GUI's actually useful rather than just glitzy, and managing wireless network connections is easier and more intuitive. Folks who have to deploy, maintain, secure and troubleshoot Windows 7 desktops will like Resource Monitor, a new Process Monitor-like tool that lets you do things like find out exactly what application's got such-and-such file locked, a tool ("Applocker") that makes restricting what users can run which apps much easier, and a new attribute called a "global SACL" that makes answering questions like "why exactly was I not allowed access to that file?" a snap. Similarly, Server 2008 R2 seems to have at least one "hey, I could use that..." feature for everyone. The AD Recycle Bin lets you undelete accidentally deleted user accounts, OUs and the like. Core parking watches your big servers when during lower-utilization times, shoves your existing tasks onto as few cores as are necessary... and shuts the other ones down, saving you a bundle in power costs. Managed Service Accounts make having to create and manage user accounts solely for use in services and IIS application pools dead simple, and greatly reduce the need for all that irritating setspn-ing. 2008 R2's DHCP offers a simple and effective way to share a DHCP scope across multiple servers.
Anyway, those are just a few of the things that Win7/R2 offer, and I've gotten the itch to write about them. I know, you're thinking, "didn't he just say that there's no money in books anymore?..." and it's probably still true, but money's not the only reason I write. Of the nearly 30 titles I've written, some of the ones that I've most enjoyed writing have been little ones about 300 to 500 pages long, like my Troubleshooting Windows 3.1, Expert Guide to Windows 95, Software Conspiracy, Linux for Windows Administrators and Administering Windows Vista Security: The Big Surprises books. They're small enough that I can do all or almost all of the writing myself. That also means that I can get the writing done in a few months, and of course a smaller book makes for quicker reading for you. So I'm sketching out a roughly 400 page book on everything that's new in Win 7/R2, a book where I can devote a short-to-medium-sized chapter to each new feature in the new OS. I aim with that to help you get up to speed on all of the new nooks and crannies in Win 7/R2 through quick, clear explanations of what each new feature does, why you care, and a practical example or two of how you'd use that feature. I'm guessing that Win 7/R2 will RTM around November as Vista did --it's just a guess-- and become generally available in February. My plan, then, is to get the book done by November so that it'll make it to the bookshelves by February of next year.
Again, thanks for reading, and I hope you'll choose to get a copy of either or both books. As always, I'm at help@minasi.com and I'm always eager to take your questions.