Interview with Samuel Goldstein, Author of CMS Made Simple Development Cookbook

Samuel is the author of our recently published CMS Made Simple Development Cookbook which contains over 70 simple but incredibly effective recipes for extending CMS Made Simple with detailed explanations – useful for beginners and experts alike!

Samuel Goldstein has worked and played with computers since receiving a TRS-80 for his birthday in 1980. Today, he is the principal at 1969 Communications (http://www.1969web.com), a Los Angeles web development company that focuses on internet-based applications for midsize businesses.

Samuel lives in Los Angeles with his wife.

Online, Samuel can be found at http://www.1969web.com

Packt: Your book is published now. How does it feel to be a published author?

Samuel: I have a number of friends and relatives who are writers, so with this first book I feel like I'm finally a member of the club. Many web development projects involve more work than writing a book, but given the nature of things, they always exist as work-in-progress. A book yields a much more tangible final result. There is a great sense of completion.

Packt: What benefits did writing a book bring to your specialist area?

Samuel: I've been a core team member on CMS Made Simple for over five years, and yet writing the book taught me a great deal about the internals and the mechanics of the system. Writing about the system requires a precise understanding of details. Most of my work tends to be very goal oriented – a client wants a system that does this, that, and the other thing – so my explorations tend to be pragmatic approaches to solving those specific problems. Writing the book enabled me to engage in more experimentation, to try things, and generally find new ways of using the system.

In the book, I tried to include solutions to the frequent problems that I encounter time and again. I wanted it to be very practical. But because the writing allowed me some freedom for experimentation, I was able to explore things I thought were possible but that I had never tried. I learned a lot!

Packt: Our authors usually have full-time jobs whilst writing for us. Was this the case for you and how did you approach managing your time?

Samuel: Yes, I have a full time job at 1969 Communications. Doing any significant project while maintaining a full time job is going to be a challenge. While the book's writing schedule was reasonable, it did mean that I had to write for several hours every night after work. Most weekends required spending at least one day catching up on the writing, as circumstances would cause me to fall behind during the week.

Packt: Whilst writing your book, did you find that it overshadowed personal life in any way? How did you deal with this?

Samuel: Writing the book was a time commitment that precluded a fair amount of social activity. But living in Los Angeles, where there are dozens of interesting events going on every minute of the day, one becomes somewhat accustomed to missing out on exciting activities. Working on the book forced me to adjust the threshold in order to decide what to attend.

There were times where I got worn down. Fortunately my wife and colleagues are fairly tolerant, and were supportive during those times.

Packt: Do you have any advice for other authors who may be interested in writing for Packt, but are still unsure?

Samuel: I'd suggest that knowledge of your subject matter is insufficient motivation to write a book. You have to love it, or at least find it quite entertaining, because you will be spending a lot of time with it.

Packt: Do you have any tips for other authors, or tricks that you learnt whilst writing, that you'd like to share?

Samuel: I'd recommend authors understand naming conventions and styling guidelines as early as possible. Ask your editor for clarification if you need it! While I received some documents with naming conventions and a sample document format, there were some inconsistencies that crept into my work early on, which added a lot of extra work for me (and the technical editor) later on.

Technically, I found keeping my work in a revision control system (not only the code samples, but the text and images for the book) was helpful. Being able to bring up the revision history of a troublesome paragraph made it easier to understand where I needed to go with it. Having a networked repository also made it easier to work on the book from my desktop, notebook, or work computer, as well as making backups easier.

Using a web-based note-taking tool like
SimpleNote proved valuable for keeping stray thoughts together in a searchable place.

Packt: How did you find the overall experience of writing your book for Packt?

Samuel: In many ways, it was like any big project. There was an inspired period at the beginning, where I was excited and enthusiastic. This enthusiasm sustained me through the acquisition process, the creation of the outline, writing some of the code for the examples, and part way through writing the first chapter. Then the doubts set in. How was I ever going to finish? And even if I did, how could I delve in depth while balancing the page count and usefulness for the readers? The balance of the process was something of a roller coaster – when the writing was going well, I'd get inspired and make a lot of progress. When the writing was difficult, I'd have to battle my way out of despair. After a few chapters, though, I fell into a routine, which helped flatten out the highs and lows. By the time I reviewed the final proofs, I was back to the highly enthusiastic levels.

Packt: During the writing process, did you come across any issues/ difficulties that affected your writing and how did you overcome these?

Samuel: Managing changes was definitely the most challenging aspect. Like many open source projects, there is continuous evolution in the CMS Made Simple world. There were two major versions released in the months between the start of writing and final publication, and the underlying APIs underwent changes. What was the preferred method for doing something at the time I started writing was not always still the preferred approach six months later when it came to editing.
More dramatically, the scope of the book changed midstream. The original plan was to cover both the current development branch of the project, and the forthcoming re-architected next generation. Half-way through the writing, the next generation project was scuttled, which resulted in frantic rewriting of portions of the book.

In the end, these changes led me to focus extra efforts on “future proofing” the example code, and making it as flexible as possible. I was also able to distill some best practices for module authors to help them write resilient code.

Packt: Was there anything interesting that happened during the writing of the book?

Samuel: Probably. I was too busy to notice :)

Packt: How did Packt’s Acquisition Editors help you - what kind of things did they help you with and how did they support you throughout the writing process?

Samuel: I worked with two acquisition editors, Eleanor Duffy and Sarah Cullington, along with a development editor and a technical editor (Hyacintha D'Souza and Arun Nadar, respectively). I had approached Packt with one idea in mind, and Eleanor helped me in the early stages to refine the primary focus and approach of the book, helping me create the outline, and guiding me through the fist few chapters. Hyacintha helped me through the bulk of the writing, and Arun reviewed the code and helped assure I had gotten it all right.

Packt: What projects, if any, are you working on at the moment?

Samuel: I've been taking some time out to play, do some photography, and relax. Recently, I've been exploring iOS development.

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