A couple of days ago I was contacted about writing the foreword for the book Beginning RSS and Atom Programming by Danny Ayers and Andrew Watt. After reading a few chapters from the book I agreed to introduce the book.
When I started writing I wasn't familiar with the format of the typical foreword for a technical book. Looking through my library I ended up with two forewords that gave me some idea of how to proceed. They were Michael Rys's introduction of XQuery: The XML Query Language by Michael Brundage and Jim Miller's introduction of Essential .NET, Volume I: The Common Language Runtime by Don Box. I suspect I selected them because I've worked directly or indirectly with both authors and the folks who wrote the forewords to their books, so felt familiar about both the subjects and the people involved.
From the various forewords I read it seemed the goal of a foreword is twofold
- Explain why the subject matter is important/relevant to the reader
- Explain why the author(s) should be considered an authority in this subject area
I believe I achieved both these goals with the foreword I wrote for the book. The book is definitely a good attempt to distill what the important things a programmer should consider when deciding to work with XML syndication formats.
Even though I have written an academic paper, magazine articles and conference presentations this was a new experience. I keep getting closer and closer to the process of writing a book. Too bad I never will though.