While I was writing my book (Programming Entity Framework), I kept track of the page count in a spreadsheet. But I stopped counting a few months ago when the first draft of was nearly done. At that point, I still had to write the intro chapter (chapter 1) and the preface, add most of the C# code and the book still had to be copy edited and edited. Plus Danny Simmons was writing the introduction which adds a few more pages.
I just got an email from my editor letting me know that the final book is going to be about 800 pages! And thankfully, this isn't a problem for O'Reilly so we don't have to start trimming anything. If you have been using Entity Framework you know there is a lot in there, a lot to learn and a lot to explain.
I'm a little bummed about the carbon footprint of an 800 page book, but I'm already finding it to be a useful resource for my own needs. I was working with a client this week and there were a number of times when I had to actually open up a chapter (lucky me, I have all of the word documents on my laptop ;-) ). I knew that I had solved the particular problem we were working on, but couldn't remember the exact details of how I did it or maybe I knew there was some code in there I could just copy and paste. I have also taken advantage of my querying chapters a number of times when I couldn't remember how to construct a particular Entity SQL expression. Hopefully this will be as good a resource for others as I am finding it is for myself! :-)
It's still targeted for a January 15th release.
