Camel in Action - 2 Years Later

 Two years ago the Camel in Action book was done and published.

Camel in Action, published January 2011

So when we started the journey of the book we knew we had one shot of getting this right. So Jonathan and I went all in, and worked our butts off to deliver a quality book that does justice to the fantastic project that Apache Camel is. So with all the hard work Jonathan and I put into it, what did we get from this? Well it was not really about the money, as that can't cover cost of living. Though to treat myself I purchased a coffee machine - which I still enjoy using every day; the coffee tastes really good. The community liked the book and have given good reviews. Looking today at the Amazon site, we have 10 top-mark reviews. The last review is as late as December 26th 2012, so people are still finding this book useful.

Ten 5-star customer reviews of the Camel in Action book from Amazon

The book seems to age well over the years, for example the last quarterly sales figures I have (Q2 2012), the book sold 701 units.  As previously said, Jonathan and I went all in with this book. So after the book was published, we had to keep the following up to date:

• Errata
• Source Code
• Responsive on Book forum

Sidenote: As a reader of other books, this is not always the case, where the authors have this devotion to their book. As a reader I fell disappointed to get started with a book, and the source code is outdated, and don't compile/work anymore. Or that mistakes in the book is not pointed out in an errata. And when I want to interact with the authors, they are not responsive on the official book forum. 

When our readers find a mistake in the book, they report that to us on the book forum, or by sending private emails. We then take a look, and if there is a mistake, make sure to get the errata updated, and submit that to Manning; who publish the update on the book site. For example the last errata update is from July 2012. Over the years since the book was published, we have released new versions of Apache Camel. So as a courtesy to new readers we are keeping the books source code in sync with the Camel releases. We only missed the Camel 2.6.0 release which was the 1st release after the book was published. So today we have 13 updates to the source code available for our readers.

Source code for the Camel in Action book, updated with the following Apache Camel releases.

The source code for the book has also been useful to the Camel team. So every time we are working on a new release, we run that release against the source code of the book, to test for any regressions etc. Over the time we have actually found a number of bugs, which we could fix before cutting the release. So what's next? Well thats a story for another blog entry, if/when that story starts...