Learning Perl Turn-in day

I have to turn in Learning Perl, 6th Edition today so it can enter “production”. This is when the O’Reilly staff essentially take the book away from me, turn off my repo access so I don’t keep fiddling, and make the book look great.

As part of that, the editor reads over the book , although there aren’t any surprises because we’ve talked about everything I was doing along the way. The graphic designers turn my crude conceptions of the figures and turn them into nice looking figures, an indexer creates the index, and many other things. This is when O’Reilly knows they have a book to sell and can start planning for its print run and delivery to bookstores.

On my side, this is where I take a break from thinking about the book for several weeks so I can forget about how hard it is to pull something like this together. The next time I think about the book is when O’Reilly sends me the “QC1 proof”, which should be close to the final form save some minor corrections and typesetting adjustments.