I wrote a book with Packt, it’s called “Getting Started with Taipy”. Taipy is a Python library that lets you create data applications. I’ve writtenlots of articles about it.
I recently wrote abouthow I got to write a book with Packt. In this article, I’ll write about the process of writing it. I’ll describe the steps involved, but I’ll also share what I experienced during the writing process. Each section of this article represents one part of the process, although they all overlapped to some extent. I’ll also discuss everything I’ve gained from this experience.
How I Got the Offer
It all started on June 13th, 2024. Pratik, someone from Packt, contacted me on LinkedIn. Packt was developing a book about Taipy, and they were looking for an author with expertise in the area.
I was able to recover the LinkedIn messages and read them again. This first contact was followed by two online meetings, the latest one on June 25th.
What I remember from this period of time is having mixed feelings. I first thought it could be a scam. I checked about other people having an experience writing for Packt, I checked about the people that contacted me, and their contacts as well; it all looked legit (and ultimately, it sure was!) I remember being excited, and also a bit worried: if I agreed to continue this, would I be able to actually write the book?
What I remember from this period is having mixed feelings. At first, I thought it could be a scam. I checked whether other people had written for Packt, looked into the people who contacted me, and even checked their contacts — everything looked legit (and ultimately, it sure was!). I remember being excited but also a bit worried: if I agreed to continue, would I actually be able to write the book?
When you get such an offer, the process doesn’t start right away, although it doesn’t take long to get started either! There’s a round of questions and explanations. The team at Packt presented their workflow. This is also when Nilesh joined in! Nilesh was on board from the beginning until the end of the project, and it was fantastic working with him all along!
I also asked a few questions. The one that intrigued me most was:was this book commissioned by the Taipy team?I didn’t know if that was something Packt did. It turned out that the book wasn’t a Taipy initiative; Packt has a current awareness team that tracks trends. They detected growing interest around Taipy and identified a need for a book in the library.
Even though the book wasn’t initiated by the Taipy team, I wanted to reach out to them to present the project. I knew them a little from being a project contributor, and I thought informing them was the least I could do. I also wanted to make sure there were no trademark or other legal issues, even though Packt has a dedicated legal team to ensure its books comply with the law. I also asked if they’d be willing to answer my questions when they arose and to review the chapters. They agreed, and I can’t thank them enough for that! Florian, Alexandre, and Rym were my main contacts at Taipy: thanks to each of them individually as well!
While these preliminary steps might seem unimportant at first glance, they were moments of extreme excitement, maybe because this was my first book! All these conversations lasted for about a month, but they also overlapped with the process of writing the outline, which I’ll talk about next.
The Outline
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Writing an outline is the first part of the process. This is something you start as soon as you sign the book’s contract (which is done electronically and is a process without much interest).
Writing the outline, along with some other documents such as the product description, was definitely the part I liked the least about the process! But it needs to be done.
This process took about two weeks, with several exchanges with the team at Packt. In the outline, you have to describe the main parts of the book and what each chapter will cover. This is a difficult task (at least for a first-timer — I think I’d do a better job if I had to go through this process again). What’s hard about this exercise is calibrating the real size of each chapter.
For example, Chapter 2 is about Taipy’s visual elements. The subject is huge, and it ended up being a mega-chapter that covers lots of concepts. Conceptually, it makes sense to have a dedicated chapter for this, but I could have imagined a way to split it into two. However, Chapters 3, 4, and 5 cover distinct aspects of Scenario Management (a Taipy-related concept) and ended up having a proper size. Doing a well-calibrated outline is hard!
Another challenge in creating the outline was imagining some of the examples I’d include in the book. Part 2 of the book is a set of tutorials that demonstrate how to create Taipy applications close to real enterprise use cases. I wanted this set of examples to show different areas of Taipy (or how to use Taipy in different ways) and also demonstrate how it can be applied in different industries, to solve problems of various types (optimization, reporting, forecasting, LLM apps, and so on). This “imagination work” takes time!
Ultimately, I had to change some of the applications I had in mind. For example, I initially wanted to create an app that uses satellite images to monitor farmland. In my head, this was great… until I thought:Which particular piece of land am I going to use?Because, you know… all those farmlands are private properties, and I didn’t want any problems (nor did I want to ask for permission). I changed the app to use public parks in Paris, which was a good compromise. This approach had pros and cons: on one hand, I had more data about the parks that I could display in the app; on the other, the size of the parks and the type of land made the app less useful. But overall, I found it to be a good compromise.
Writing the first draft of the outline was quick, but finalizing it tookquite some time— about two months. Of course, that doesn’t mean I spent two months writing nonstop; it was mostly small improvements and changes following reviews by different stakeholders. The last messages I can find in my emails regarding the outline date are from late August. By that point, I was already writing the book!
Speaking of writing the book, let’s see how that went!
The Writing Process
The writing process is the longest part. For each chapter, the process includes:
Writing the chapter…
It was reviewed by a person at Taipy
It was then reviewed for editing
It was then reviewed by technical reviewers (not affiliated with Taipy)
It was then reviewed for copy editing
It underwent a final revision by the author
If you consider that “writing the chapter” also involved reviewing what I had just written — several times — this means I had to re-read each chapter ten times or more. And honestly, reviewing a text — whatever text it may be — so many times is emotionally difficult. But I did it!
Let’s go back to the beginning of writing a chapter. The process starts with creating drafts and sketching the concepts I’ll write about. But if you think that actual writing is what takes the most time… you’re not even close to the truth. Writing takes some time, yes, but there’swaymore to it!
Since the book is about a Python library (Taipy) that lets you create data applications, almost every chapter includes an app coded specifically for it. This means that for most chapters, I had to build a demonstration app, and coding apps takes time!
When starting a chapter, I’d have to decide exactly what application I was going to code. This included finding a dataset that made sense for the app and that had a license I could use in the book. Just imagining all this was already a time-consuming process!
The next step was usually creating the application while writing the key parts of the process as it was being built. This took a lot of time, especially for Chapters 7 to 14. The reason is that, while Taipy helps you create apps quickly, what actually takes time is coding all the other parts (the non-Taipy parts, if you will, such as machine learning pipelines or geographic information programs).
Continue reading the full article on our Medium handle.
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