The Implementation of the Book

The online cookbook (at http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/) was the entry point for the recipes. Users got free accounts, filled in a form, and presto, their recipes became part of the cookbook. Thousands of people read the recipes, and some added comments, and so, in the publishing equivalent of peer review, the recipes matured and grew. (The online cookbook is still very much active and growing.)

Going from the online version to the version you have in front of you was a fairly complex process. The data was first extracted from Zope and converted into XML. We then categorized the recipes and selected those recipes that seemed most valuable, distinctive, and original. Then, it was just a matter of editing the recipes to fit the format of the cookbook, checking the code for correctness (the PyChecker tool deserves special thanks, as it was quite useful in this regard), adding a few recipes here and there for completeness of coverage in some areas, and doing a final copyediting pass.

It sounds simple when you write it down in one paragraph. Somehow, we don't remember it as quite as being simple as that!