Special Announcement: The Metal Programming Guide

Hello all. For the last few weeks I have been hinting that I have a new project that I had not yet announced yet. I wanted to make this announcement at MacTech, which I did yesterday, so I am now publicly announcing this.

I am working on a new book: The Metal Programming Guide. If you are familiar with the OpenGL series of books like the OpenGL Red Book and the OpenGL Blue Book, this is going to be The Red Book for Metal. The publisher for this project will be Pearson/Addison Wesley, so this is not a self-publishing effort on my part. I will have technical editors and people breathing down my neck if I miss deadlines!

Back in 2014, when Metal was announced, it excited me tremendously. I did a series of conference talks on it throughout that year, but a little thing called Swift kind of got in the way of my learning path for Metal.

This year has been something of a disaster for me on a personal level and I didn’t get to accomplish what I had hoped to this year. Being given an opportunity to finally get to master Metal and write a book about it has given me hope for the future. I have always felt like Metal was something I was meant to do, but I wasn’t really ready to tackle it until now.

Right now I am trying to balance doing some short term contract work with attempting to work on the book. I hope to not run out of money before I finish the book, but I also want to avoid doing full time work that would prevent me from making progress on the book. We are very early in the process right now, but I am giving it everything I have to try and get this done in a reasonable amount of time.

I am hoping to be able to make weekly posts on here and my podcast about various aspects of Metal programming that I am not able to include in the book due to lack of time/space/things being out of scope.

Even though I have been a co-author on a number of programming books already, it has always been my dream to do an immersive book on a topic such as Metal. I am excited to learn this amazing framework and share that knowledge with everyone else.

I’m announcing it here on this blog because I have absolute confidence that this project will be successful. I’ve been waiting to do this for a long time. I do not plan to drop the ball on this. Bring it on!