Gathering errata, editing slides

The book has now been shipping from Amazon, B&N, and Powells for about a month. Errata and comments are starting to come in. Meanwhile, we are working on slides for instructors to use.

Slides will go in two passes. In the first pass, we are producing simple text-heavy slides following closely on the outline of the book; we have been advised that this is what many instructors prefer. When we have a full set of those, we will make a second pass selectively producing slides that add examples, more graphic content, and other materials that do not follow the contents of the book quite so closely (though still keyed to chapters). We can probably finish the first pass by August, when many classes begin.

Most of this material will be hosted at our main book web site.

A real, physical book

I received my first copy of the bound book today. I have to admit being a bit underwhelmed by the physical thing ... 512 pages looks a lot bigger on laser printer paper. That's ironic because we really worked hard to keep the length down. I was inspired by watching director's commentary on DVD movies, which so often say "We shot a really good scene in which Patrick eats his parrot, but we needed to move the main plot along, so we chopped it."

We use a lot of gray backgrounds and very light rules, which tend to come out either too light or too dark as we move from laser printer to laser printer. They came out great; the gamut of printing presses is much wider, and the resolution much higher, than the best laser printers.

Vital statistics

There are 510 physical pages in the camera-ready copy (reduced from 512 pages in the final pass over corrections). That includes 22 pages of front-matter (table of contents, list of tables, preface, half title and title page, and so on), the bibliography, and the index. Pages in the main matter of the book — that is the part excluding front and back matter — are numbered 1 through 466. The bibliography goes from page 467 through 478 (and is by no means comprehensive — we tried to cite only a handful of good starting points for each topic). The index runs from page 479 through page 487 (which is really page 509 because front-matter has its own page numbering). Presses print in "signatures" of 16 or 32 pages, so the physical book will have 512 pages.

The book was typeset in pdfLaTeX, which I think would not have been possible without The LaTeX Companion by Michel Goossens, Frank Mittelbach & Alexander Samarin. I was using the first edition, but Amazon now lists a second edition. It would be lovely to have a good word processor that was really up to the task, but the only one I know that even comes close is FrameMaker, which has been more-or-less orphaned by Adobe. Fortunately TeXShop by Richard Koch, Max Horn, and Dirk Olmes made life with a document compiler sufficiently interactive.

The manuscript is at the printers

We shipped the camera ready manuscript to Wiley yesterday, and it's headed to Malloy printing ... if the schedule holds, it will be a bound book by the end of the month.

And naturally, a reader of a draft pointed out an error today (in a table in the combinatorial testing chapter). Sigh. Time to start compiling errata sheets.

Of course, if it were possible to completely avoid errors, or to absolutely scrub them through human processes, a book about software testing and analysis would not be needed. We'd just prescribe the right magic fairy dust for bug-free software and be done with it. It's the critical shortage of magic fairy dust that makes it a challenging enough problem to motivate a lot of researchers developing a lot of different and complementary approaches that require some real understanding and problem-solving skill to use well.

Camera ready going in on Monday

The manuscript has been through a round of proofreading at Wiley, and is almost through the revisions in response to the proofreader's marks. On Monday evening, February 26, the final camera-ready copy goes back to Wiley. They might still ask for a few small adjustments, but basically we're winding it up now.

Meanwhile Apogeo has agreed to publish the Italian edition, which Mauro will translate. The market for a fairly specialized book in a fairly small language market is pretty limited, but the Italian edition is important to us for obvious reasons, and Apogeo is the right publisher for a high quality book.

The work won't come to an end. There is a solutions manual for the exercises, but it needs some of the polish that we've been applying to the main text. We'll also be working on slides, additional exercises, etc. And (am I too optimistic?) we can start planning revisions for the second edition.