Hello! We released The Pocket Guide to Debugging back in December, and here’s a final update: the print copies are done printing and they’ve arrived at the warehouse, ready to ship to anyone who wants one.

You can buy the print or PDF version now, and if you preordered it, your copy should already have shipped. Some people have told me that they already received theirs! Email me if you haven’t gotten the shipping confirmation.

some pictures

Here are some photos of what the print version looks like:

what was involved in printing it

In case anyone is interested, here’s what was involved in putting together the print version:

1. Make a PDF copy that people can print on their home printer (with a 360-line Python program)
2. Test on my home printer that the “print at home version” prints properly
3. Release the “print at home” version (this was back in December)
4. Take a couple of weeks off, since it’s the end of the year
5. Ask the illustrator to make a back cover
6. Get a quote from the print company
7. Agonize a bit over whether to print the zine as perfect bound or saddle stitched (stapled). Pick perfect bound.
8. Find out from the print company how wide the spine has to be
9. With the help of the illustrator, make a design for the spine.
10. Get an ISBN number (just a couple of clicks at Libraries and Archives Canada)
11. Get a bar code for the ISBN (from bookow), edit it to make it a little smaller, and put it on the back cover
12. Send the new PDF to the print company and request a print proof
13. Wait a week or so for the proof to get shipped across the continent
14. Once the proof arrives, realize that the inner margins are too small, because it was perfect bound and perfect bound books need bigger margins (We’d already tried to account for that, but we didn’t make them big enough)
15. Measure various books I have around the house and print some new sample pages to figure out the right margins
16. Painstakingly manually readjust every single page to have slightly different proportions, so that I can increase the margins
17. Edit the Python script to make a new PDF with the bigger margins
18. Send the final files to the print company
19. Wait a week for them to print 1500 copies
20. The print copies arrive at the warehouse!
21. Wait another 3 business days for the (amazing) folks who do the shipping to send out all 700 or so preorders
22. Success!

Printing 1500 copies of something is always a little scary, but I’m really happy with how it turned out.

thanks so much to everyone who preordered!

If you preordered the print version, thanks so much for your patience – having the preorders really helps me decide how many to print.

And please let me know if something went wrong – 1 or 2 packages always get lost in the mail and while I can’t help find them, it’s very easy for me to just ship you another one :)