Strangest thing happened a couple of weeks ago. I was contacted by someone at O'Reilly because they needed a quote about me for the new version of my book Flash Out of the Box.

The strange part is that I didn't know the book was being updated. I had passed on the opportunity to update the book myself several months ago for personal reasons, and O'Reilly said they'd be stil be interested in updating it with another author. I asked them to keep me in the loop because I'd love to help out somehow - I just didn't want to do the whole project. That was the last I ever heard about it.

Seems they moved forward regardless, and Rich Shupe (the founder of FMA in New York) became the author for the revision. The book was rolled up into the O'Reilly Digital Studio series, redesigned, and renamed to "Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity".

They sent me a PDF proof of the book, which I quickly reviewed. It was quite good. Shupe did a great job of retaining most of the material from the original, modifying some of it to show off the new features in Flash 8, and made several additions to show off features not available in previous versions of Flash. The book looked great, and definitely carried the spirit of the original version. So I got them a quote, sent in my updated bio, and agreed to let them continue listing me as co-author (70% of the book, give or take, was content I wrote, after all). The book went to print the next day.

Yesterday, I received the first copy of Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity.

It's a little surreal seeing my name on the spine of a book I knew nothing about until two weeks ago, but hey, it came out great and I'm happy about it.

So ... I guess my second book has just been released. This one was much easier than the first.

Thanks to Rich Shupe, my book lives on, and many more readers can get up to speed with Flash and start building cool stuff quickly. Kudos to Rich for making it a great second version.

Strangely, the very next day, I was offered a deal from Peachpit to write my third(?) book, called "Designing the Obvious", to be released somewhere around September 2006. DTO is not about Flash at all. Rather, it's about the qualities of great Web-based software and how to create them. It's meant to take Don't Make Me Think to the next level, and I'm very excited about it. Keep an eye out for it later this year in a bookstore near you!