Nearly three years ago, I wrote the following blog post:

Reason # 4218 why I don't think I'll ever write a book

From Chris Sells' blog:

Then Mike read all 1300 pages, making sure that the copy editor didn't change the meaning of anything.

With the PDFs in hand, we both read the ~1000 pages again (the move to Quark puts in the final styles), looking for things that got messed up during the move between software packages or new things that we notice.

Egad!

I have a feeling that Charles Petzold is doing the same about now, since on 4/5 he said he had one more month before his 1000 page WPF book is due.

This post came to my mind today as I near the end of the second review of my 800 page book. Reading that blog post certainly makes me laugh...at myself! I'm doing just the same thing that Chris and Mike did. I went through all 800 pages in the late fall after the copy editor worked on it and worked back and forth with her until all of her questions and any changes I didn't like were worked out. 

Then the whole thing was put into PDF format and I have spent the past two weeks reading through the PDF very carefully, all 800 pages again, to make sure everything is okay. Of course, I've found a million things I didn't notice before or have learned since and have many pages of notes for the editor who will probably pass out when she returns from vacation and sees them.

It's astonishing to think of the amount of time that I have put into this project over the past 10 months. Especially considering that I sometimes have a short attentions span. This latest review alone might add up to something like 70 or 80 hours. It's like a full time job. But to me, it's more than worth it. It seems pointless to go to all this effort and not make this book the best that I can.