Idigicon has great possibilities for publishing materials! In fact they use the same services they use for manuals and instructions for their own home-brand products made by the Coders Workshop.
Perhaps a deal can be struck to publish through them?
It's not a bad way to go...
As for your tracks and such, here is what I would personally recommend;
I'd just look at whatever text books or programming, etc books that you have on hand. Or maybe go a library or local book store if you are short handed of examples and see how the 'professionals' do it. Check out how far they explain the surrounding theory behind what you're trying to teach or explain and how much they insert their own personalized dialoge. It's kinda like looking at someone elses code and learning in the same way.
You're not writting this thing for robots afterall, but you also don't want to end up making a joke and story book either. :lol:
I think the best way to aim your material is to stick to the game theory and avoid getting too wrapped up in APIs, platform specific areas and anything that will distract too much from the task at hand. If you want to cover different APIs or platforms, I believe the best way is to make a seperate section or chapter for it. Every book I've read seems to do it this way.
You cannot really avoid the language too much, since how else are you gonna write this thing? So you are stuck having to get into language specifc things, but it might also be best to not get sucked into explainning every function, type or method you are using. Again, I'd recommend a seperate chapter all together for these things. Possibly at the beginning if it really seems like it's required. This way we know what you are talking about before we start using it.
I think, [size=9px](again this is just what I think not nessissarily the way it is)[/size] that writting a tutorial or small instruction is not really the same as writting a book. The tutorial has to be small and is sort of meant to be consumed in smaller chunks. The book on the other hand, while it still can be written so that you don't need to go from cover to cover to do anything, you have all this material to fit into it that you have to organize it a little better so everything is easily found and accessable. The better you break up the materials into their own segments of topics the easier it is for the reader to come back to it and use it as a reference later on. Which is really what most would want [size=9px](again, my belief)[/size] for the ideal programming book.
Hope some of my ideas and thoughts help you in your goal here. I'm dying to be able to see another Pascal-based games programming book out there.
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