After many long months of work, “The Metal Programming Guide” is available for pre-order. Many people have been asking me questions and here are the answers to the most frequent ones:

• The book is in Swift.
• I don’t know if this will be available in an eBook format. I would be greatly surprised if it wasn’t. Every other book in the Red Book series has a Kindle or a PDF version available. If the book is available as an eBook, I believe it will be accessible.
• I will be taking into account what happens at WWDC. As of today, the rough draft of the book is 75% complete. That translates to 15 chapters completed and five to go. I have a placeholder chapter for whatever new and shiny thing may be introduced at WWDC.
• There is going to be sample code. I had some really tight writing deadlines and it was not possible for me to write the code concurrently with writing the book. I intend to spend the time between when the book is completed and when it’s released to ensure there is good informative sample code. I hope to continue to add to this sample code and maintain it as Swift and Metal evolve.
• The overall composition of the book is about 50% graphics and 50% GPGPU programming. There are a few chapters in the graphics section that you will need to read if you’re only interested in GPGPU programming. Those are detailed at the beginning of that section.

One thing that I have learned while working on this book is that it’s impossible for this to be everything to all people. There are chapters in this book that have entire books dedicated to them. It wasn’t possible to write all of the implementation details of complex operations such as facial detection. My hope with the book is to basically prime the mental pump. I hope that if you encounter a topic you find interesting that I am giving you just enough information about it that you can somewhat wrap your head around it and seek out dedicated resources for it.

One of the biggest questions I have gotten over the last year is “Why should I know Metal?“ I am hoping that my conceptual chapters do a good job of answering that question for you.

I’m incredibly excited for this book. This is the book I have wanted to write since WWDC 2014. I thought that I waited too long and I missed out on being the person to write this book. I feel incredibly grateful for having the opportunity to take a year and really dive deeply into Metal. I knew since I started programming I wanted to learn and understand graphics. Getting to take that knowledge and apply it to thinks like data analysis and machine learning.

I loved math as a child. I felt like it was the language that helps us understand the Universe. I strayed away from it as a young adult because I had a bad experience with it and figured I was stupid and that it wasn’t for me. By bashing my head against vectors and matrices and seeing how you can use them to do amazing things has been a mental renaissance for me.

In life you don’t get a lot of opportunities to work on something you’re passionate about. I have been fortunate in my career to have several of these opportunities and I cherish every one of them.