Bruno Lowagie maybe write a new iText Book

Bruno Lowagie is the orgianl developer of iText and the author of iText in Action, said in the maillist on  Jul 23, 2009,

Hello all,

it was a nice surprise to log in, and to discover that all the iText
questions were already answered by other people. I’m very busy for the
moment because I have a phone call with Manning (the publisher of iText
in Action) in about 7 hours.

They want to talk about writing a revision for “iText in Action”, but
I’m not really interested in doing a makeover of that book. “iText in
Action” already has 600+ pages. I have plenty of ideas for new examples,
I no longer like the Foobar examples, and I fear that I’ll end up with a
900+ pages book.

To make a long story short: I’d prefer writing a new book from scratch.
Or rather: instead of writing a book with 900 pages, I’m thinking of
writing 3 books of about 300 pages (of which only 2 would need to be
available in print).

1. “Introducing iText”: a book that would introduce iText for people who
don’t want to be confronted with PDF too much. It would explain the
basics of PDF creation and manipulation without too much theory (to
avoid readers to be distracted from the main goal: getting something
done with iText). “iText in Action” didn’t have any examples using a
real database (all the data was in XML files). For “Introducing iText”,
I would use a real SQL database and use that database to create PDF
(with more stress on ColumnText and PdfPTable; and less “reference
material” on the other “basic building blocks”). I’d also fill out forms
with data from this database.
The code samples would be very similar to the “Film” examples that are
available here: http://1t3xt.info/examples/classroom.php

2. “Understanding PDF”; a book that would cover the most important parts
of ISO-32000, but from the point of view of the iText developer. For
instance: whereas “Introducing iText” would simply explain how to use
AcroFields.setField(key, value); “Understanding PDF” would explain the
difference between AcroForm technology (dictionaries) and XFA (XML
forms). The code samples would be similar to the “Hello World” examples
in the “iText Classroom”; but the PDF syntax would be more important
than the iText source code.

3. “Mastering PDF with iText”; this book would cover selected topics.
For instance: RichMedia and PDF, OCSP and Timestamping, Portable
Packages,… This “book” probably shouldn’t be available in print; maybe
it could be offered for free for those people who have bought book 1
and/or 2.

Ideally, I should be able to combine writing these books with the
development of new functionality. That was possible when I wrote “iText
in Action”; I hope I find the time to do the same thing now.

Regardless of what the publisher says about these ideas, I’m starting to
write new tutorials on http://1t3xt.info/tutorials/tutorial.php
However, as the end result could be a set of books, the content of these
“tutorials” won’t be available for free. That’s why those pages are
protected with a password.

For the moment, there’s nothing to see yet (so please don’t ask for a
password right now). As soon as I’ve finished an outline, the core
developers will receive an account to have access to the new tutorials.
I’ll also need some other readers to review what I’m writing (for
instance: Alexis, you’d make a good reviewer).

Please let me know what you think about this. Suggestions are more than
welcome. I’ll keep you up to date on this list, and if I’m asked to
write a “book proposal“, I’ll probably post different versions of the
“Table Of Contents” for you to discuss.

best regards,
Bruno