In 2012 I started with writing books. First as a hobby, then due to health reasons more seriously. All of my books are available via LeanPub, a company that offers self-publishing services for authors. The nice thing is that you can publish early (even draft) versions of your book at a low price. Buyers get free updates for a life time, even if the book price goes up. There's an inidcation which precentage the current completeness is expected to be. A book sample is available for all books. Click the cover page of a book to read more.
My first publication was Inside Enterprise Architect. After having dug for so many years
in the guts of Enterprise Architect the time had come to bring the many secrets to light which I had found.
This is the only book about internals of Enterprise Architect. And you likely will regret not having read it earlier.
From time to time readers send me their findings and I add those to the treasure chest. With the next book release all subscribers receive an update so everybody can profit.
Shortly after having published my first book I could see some demand for publications dealing with Enterprise Architect.
So I started writing Scripting Enterprise Architect.
I remembered how I had been struggling the first time when developing an add-in for Enterprise Architect. For that reason the book is written in a way to introduce people step by step into the API of Enterprise Architect. It is accompanied by samples which enable the reader to help himself.
Besides an augmented help reference you will find a large number of cross references between GUI and API so you know how to tackle some concrete task.
Next in the row was Enterprise Architect for the Business Analyst.
It's a bit different to other books trying to teach people using UML as it starts with the end - a complete system.
From hardware over software via use cases back to requirements it takes the reader by the hand to describe an existing
system. The intro teaches some basics about UML and Enterprise Architect so even analysts with weak background will find
their way.
The book is - so to say - complete. From what I heard back there does not seem to be missing much. My other books are at 99 percent since a long time and I still add useful information from time to time. You all know the behavior of progress bars, when they come to their end.
The next book, Shape Script made easy,
is about Enterprise Architect's Shape Script language. Since there was no (usable) tutorial except for
some sample scripts from Sparx I decided to fill the gap and offer a tutorial for Shape Script.
While assembling the book I felt like a beta tester since a number of things did not work as described.
The book covers all of Shape Script's features along with a couple of patterns that can be re-used.
The book was published almost complete the first time. Like for the other books I keep the updates free of charge. Recent releases of EA (12 upward) include enhancements to Shape Script which will be covered in one of the next releases.
My latest book deals with MDGs in Enterprise Architect. Here I take an (almost) complete tour to Enterprise Architect MDG technology.
Key topics are
- Preparing a domain model
- Creating a base MDG with stereotypes, diagrams and toolboxes
- MDG deployment variants
- Profile versioning
- Quick linker definition and much more
There are a few areas where I'm still working on so the price is still low. I recommend this book to everyone who wants to understand how to create and maintain MDGs. Lots of tips and tricks that (I bet) even advanced users are not aware of.
The next book in the pipeline will deal with configuration management for Enterprise Architect. I can not foresee a time frame for that one yet.