Sometimes people write to tell me that they like my writing style, that I’m good at explaining things. Other people write and say that if they wrote a book, they would have written it just like mine.
The truth is, when I first started working with Scala I fell in love with the language, so wanting to write about it was easy. After that, I’m not that smart, so I have to break complex things down so I can understand them myself. So I think that by breaking things down and looking for meaningful examples, people seem to appreciate what I’ve written (or I hope they do).
After I wrote the Scala Cookbook and people sent me notes like that, I struggled with writing for a little while. Then I decided to just try to write for a younger version of myself and ignore what other people were saying. I just ask myself, “Would this have helped Al 2+ years ago?” Since then I’ve been fine.
