He’s getting ready to write a book

Eric Novik does some open-source planning:

My co-author, Jacki Buros, and I [Novik] have just signed a contract with Apress to write a book tentatively entitled “Predictive Analytics with R”, which will cover programming best practices, data munging, data exploration, and single and multi-level models with case studies in social media, healthcare, politics, marketing, and the stock market.

Why does the world need another R book? We think there is a shortage of books that deal with the complete and programmer centric analysis of real, dirty, and sometimes unstructured data. Our target audience are people who have some familiarity with statistics, but do not have much experience with programming. . . .

The book is projected to be about 300 pages across 8 chapters. This is my first experience with writing a book and everything I heard about the process tells me that this is going to be a long and arduous endeavor lasting anywhere from 6 to 8 months.

Novik emailed me and wrote:

The work seems overwhelming. I always wondered how you manage to produce such high volume of high quality content. What’s the secret?

The first secret is, I wouldn’t try to write a book in 6 to 8 months. The first edition of Bayesian Data Analysis took several years. Each new edition took awhile too. So if “long and arduous” to you means “6 to 8 months,” I think your time management skills are already much better than mine!