I was recently involved in the production of the book ASP.NET MVC in Action written by Jeffrey Palermo, Ben Scheirman and Jimmy Bogard.

This was a particularly interesting experience for me as I'd never been involved in the production of a technical book before and it was quite an eye-opening experience to see all of the work that goes on behind the scenes.

My job consisted of three main tasks:

• Checking the technical accuracy of the book
• Ensuring code snippets were formatted and annotated correctly
• Testing the accompanying sample code

It was easier to proofread some chapters than others. The book was being written when the MVC framework was still in its early previews so some areas of the book required quite a few changes to reflect the RTM version of ASP.NET MVC. Also, some of the chapters (particularly chapter 11 which included a section on Ruby on Rails) covered topics that I was not very familiar with, so checking these for technical accuracy took more time.

Annotating the code snippets required adding the appropriate markup to the chapters to ensure that the typesetters knew which lines should be turned into "cueballs" in the final manuscript. This also required editing a lot of the comments to make sure they were short enough. This is what an annotated code snippet looked like:

...and this is the end result:

Despite being quite a lot of work (I ended up reading the book from cover-to-cover 4 times!), I really enjoyed working with Jeffrey, Ben, Jimmy and the production team at Manning.

PS: Go buy the book!