Randolph (Originally posted on my technical blog.)
For the last six months or so, I have been helping some really smart people put words on paper, both the physical and electronic kind, which is hopefully going to culminate in an actual technical book that I can point to and say “Yes, that’s the name I invented for myself when we moved to Canada”.
My own contribution is somewhere in the region of 64,000 words (including the chapters I took over from other authors who had to leave the project), which sounds like a lot until you realize most of the words are “NOTE” or “CAUTION!”. I think William wrote double that amount.
SQL Server is a massive product and there are lots of moving parts. No single person can know everything, though I did accidentally become the nascent expert in SQL Server on Linux, albeit briefly.
The book is due to be released early in 2018. I’ve started and never finished enough projects to know that putting a release date on publication is a fool’s errand, so I’ll leave it to Pearson and Microsoft Press to do the hard work.
You can go and preorder it from Amazon if you’d like. That would be super, because ever since I got paid $25 (Canadian) to be in a TV show, I’ve heard stories that authors of technical books get paid less than actors, and I need the proof in the form of a royalty cheque!
Until then, I encourage you to download and install a trial version of SQL Server 2017. The installer is really easy to use for both Windows and Linux.
If you find any mistakes, those are the fault of the other authors. Except chapter 2. That was the first one that I wrote, and it’s probably terrible.