As announced on twitter a few days back, it seems that the time has come for me to step up and start dealing with printed paper.
It’s not something I’ve never talked about, and especially in the last 9 months I wanted to start something towards this direction – my draft of REST webservices in PHP is still there ideed.
At the same time, even though self-publishing is easier and provides good motivation at first, is not very attractive on the long run, for both the author and the reader: yes, you get to reach a wide audience, yes, they can learn in a really cheap way1, but writing a real book is way different. It’s a statement, a printed statement: it is just different.
The chance has come quite quickly, as I will be co-author of a book by Manning Publications Co., which is a very important editor when it comes to the language with the J.
Isn’t it strange? I am a seasoned lead developer on the LAMP stack but I will write a book dealing with a tool that has something to do with Java: there a reason, of course, behind this.
And probably you have already guessed it.
Long story short, Luca Garulli2, the brilliant mind who gave OrientDB, a sensational document-graph database, to the world, needed some more fat fingers helping him for the first ever book on the topic, and being directly connected to Luca – as he used to work with my previous CTO, Alex, we both attended the 2011 NoSQL Day and we’ve spent some time together when I was living in Rome – made us decide to try to make it together: I feel we are a perfect match, given my youngsta passion and his endless commitment to his baby.
Fact is that OrientDB is not just a NoSQL graphDB, it is a brand new way to think about storage engines in 2012 , when we already proved that relational databases won’t fit all the scenarios out there, that document DBs over HTTP aren’t a long-term solution and that we live in a world where linked data is a first class citizen in our lives, not just somewhere in the internets.
Our challenge is to evangelize this new frontier for data storage: I’m sure it will be a long but succesfull way.