Don’t worry, it’s not out yet, but it will be.

Recently, friends have been urging: your second edition of reptile book why not ah, I have been waiting for several years! Didn’t you finish this a few months ago? You’re taking so long.

Don’t worry, it’s really coming soon.

Why did the second edition of my book have a difficult birth? There are several reasons:

  • One reason is my work. I wrote the first edition of the book during my graduate study, and found that some cases in the book were overdue, so I decided to write the second edition. However, work is work after all, and the content of work still needs to be put first. Therefore, the content of the second edition of the book was basically written after work or on weekends, so the progress was very slow.

  • In order to solve the problem of expired cases, I spent a lot of energy to make the crawler case platform, eliminate.center /, which contains dozens of crawler cases. These cases are explained in the book with coordination, which solves the problem of expired cases and helps readers better practice. This case platform has been done for less than half a year.

After the book is finished, there are actually a lot of things, such as review, modification, cover design, recommendation language and so on, in short, the steps are very tedious, another day to write an article to introduce the book writing this matter.

Separate recommendations.

Recommendation language is printed on the back of the book experts on the book’s evaluation and recommendation content, generally is a few words plus the Title of the experts. One of the big ideas I had was to ask Guido van Rossum, the father of Python, to write a recommendation for me.

You know who the father of Python is, right? Guido van Rossum, who wrote Python in 1989.

Someone said, “How dare you ask the father of Python to give you this” unknown “writing recommendation? The noise? How could anyone talk to you?

It’s incredible to think about, but I’d like to try, and I’d be honored to be recommended by the father of Python!

And because OF my work at Microsoft, Guido, the father of Python, announced he was joining Microsoft in 2020. So, he and I are more or less in the same company.

So, maybe there’s a chance?

Ok, so the problem is, my book is written in Chinese, the father of Python can’t read Chinese, what can I do? Do I have to translate the whole book?

Yes, that’s true, I can’t give Chinese content or ask him to write recommendation for me without giving me anything, can I? This is ridiculous.

Before that, the whole book had been under review and revision for several months, and by the time the manuscript was reviewed, it would be around September, and then AROUND September, I got a Word document from the editor that was approved for the book, but it hadn’t been typesetted. Looking at it, the Word document runs to over 1000 pages. Boy, I can’t believe I wrote that much.

But I can’t help it. That’ll have to be translated.

It would be too troublesome for me to translate all the chapters by hand, so I found some tools from the Internet, such as Word full-text translation tool, which is connected with Google Translate. However, these tools still have upload size limit, so I split the chapters and merged them after translating part by part.

Of course, we all know that The quality of Google Translation can not be guaranteed, such as some statements and nouns on the translation is not accurate, I have to manually review and modify. So I spent many more days checking and revising the whole paper, including inaccurate titles, expressions, nouns and so on. Then I reorganized the whole index.

In a word, the whole translation preparation process took almost half a month. At last, the English version was translated to 1600 pages, as shown in the picture. For example, the last section of the catalog is 1561 pages:

But that’s not enough. What if I throw the book in the past and people don’t have time to read it? I have to tell you something about the whole book.

So I translated the introduction and preface of the book again, including the original intention of writing the book, the introduction of the whole book and the planning of the whole chapter, which can help Guido better understand the context and content of the whole book.

And so we have the following:

It still doesn’t seem like enough. What if Guido thinks writing recommendations is a hassle? Would it be more helpful if I could provide him with several Draft candidates? So he could get some inspiration or tweak it a little bit, so I drafted some candidate recommendations and put together a document.

Well, I think we’re almost there. There are three things:

  • The translation of the book

  • An introduction to the contents of the book

  • Candidate recommendations

The next step was to contact Guido.

For a bit more formal, I sent an email to Guido, mail the whole content is: first, under the said thanks and respect to him, then introduce the basic situation of themselves and the book’s basic situation, what I do, for example, the first edition of the book sales in China and so on, then get right to the point that want to ask him to help write a recommendation. Then I will attach some detailed information about my book, such as the full-text translation manuscript, content introduction, candidate recommendations, etc.

As follows:

I pressed the send button with great trepidation and excitement.

What followed was a long wait.

I wake up every morning and check my mail to see if I’ve heard from Guido.

Not back.

Still no answer.

Still no answer.

Or still didn’t answer.

It looks like it’s getting cold.

It looks cold.

It looks really cold.

It’s really cold.

Maybe he was too busy or didn’t see my email.

Later, I contacted the general Director of our department (I will not reveal the specific information here) to see if he could connect Guido for me, and he readily agreed.

I’m not quite sure how my Director contacted me. He said that he had contacted Guido alone, maybe by sending a letter or making internal contact.

And the next day, he told me he got Guido’s reply! Guido said that he was really busy recently, and he really hopes to have a Draft Candidate recommendation for him. It would be better if he could rewrite it according to the content of the book.

My Director is also very good, he also gave me a lot of suggestions, helped me modify the Draft Candidate recommendation I wrote before to him, forwarded my email and introduced me.

Finally, Guido gives the final recommendation!!

I really jumped for joy when I received this email, so happy! My book has finally been recommended by the father of Python!

The text is as follows:

I am happy to see that Python is so widely used in the Chinese IT community. I hope this book will help more people understand Python and web crawling/scraping. *

–Guido van Rossum, creator of Python, Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft

I am very happy that Python has been widely used in the Chinese community. I hope this book can help more people learn Python and web crawlers.

Well, the whole process was quite long, but I’m really happy to have a good result at last. I’m really honored to be recommended by the father of Python, and I’m also very grateful to my Director for helping me contact and make suggestions.

After getting Guido’s recommendation, the following process will be very fast. I have also contacted with the recommendation and preface of other experts. I really appreciate the recommendation of each expert, and I will express my thanks one by one in the book.

Now the content has been reviewed, and finally the recommendation is added to the cover and printed!

Please wait a little longer, Python3 web crawler development In Action (version 2) will be available soon

For more exciting content, please pay attention to my public account “Attack Coder” and “Cui Qingcai | Jingmi”.