On Friday afternoon I received a complete set of page proofs. These are the printouts of the entire book (less index) for my review. It is my last chance to ensure that no typos or misplaced diagrams appear in the text. After attending a geek meeting on the 29th, I started reading early in the morning of the 30th. I stopped reading, disgusted, mid-morning on the 30th! There was a mistake on at least every page. Simple things, mostly, like the chapter titles in the page headers, any monospaced word appearing as the word “monospace” and so on.
And I still hadn’t had a chance to review the test CD sent to me on the 27th January.
In typical fashion, the CD was broken! The last minute change to split chapter 7 had an unfortunate side affect on the source code… but only on a virgin machine. Every one of my test machines had ch07/network.hpp hidden somewhere in the include path. But a clean room test highlighted the issue. I had to accept responsibility, and pressed another CD to send on the 1st February. This was duly re-mastered and returned to me on the 8th, along with a 2nd set of page proofs (this time on PDF.)
This time, everything was fine, and the book went to print on the 11th February 2005.