I was sitting in the back of the Liferay Car (yes, Liferay owns an old, beat-up Toyota Corolla), and Brian Kim, Liferay’s Chief Operating Officer, was sitting next to me, giving me a hard time. I was already uncomfortable in the back seat: I’m 6'2", and my knees were up next to my ears. But it was only a short trip from the Liferay Symposium hotel in Anaheim, CA, to Brian Chan’s house (where we and the other occupants of the car were staying), so I wouldn’t have to endure the cramped quarters for long.

You see, I’d written a couple of editions of Liferay’s Administrator’s Guide, but its companion volume, the Developer’s Guide, had suffered several aborted attempts at getting off the ground. It had finally achieved some semblance of completion, but it wasn’t yet where I wanted it to be. The problem was, I needed to release some developer documentation soon, so I could get to work on the training materials and the documentation for the next release of Liferay. For this reason, I’d resigned myself to publishing what we had and then attempting to make the next edition of the book more complete. We’d been self-publishing the Administrator’s Guide, so I thought we should do the same with the Developer’s Guide, particularly because it wasn’t going to be as complete as I wished.

Brian wasn’t giving me a hard time because of that: Liferay was in a period of rapid growth, and we often found ourselves in the position of having more work than we had hands to complete it. Instead, Brian was giving me a hard time, frankly, because he had a bigger vision than I had.

“Why do you want to self-publish again?” Brian asked. “Don’t you think it would be better if we worked with a book publisher?”

“Of course it would,” I said. “I just think that the material I currently have isn’t yet up to the standards that one of the two publishers I’d want to work with would accept.”

“Really? Okay, what would it take to get it that way?”

“Well, I’d have to be able to dedicate more time to writing the book, which I can’t do right now.” I then gave him my sob story about all the work that I had to finish in addition to the Developer’s Guide.

“Then let’s hire some people to help you. One problem solved. Who are the two publishers you’d like to work with?”

I told him. Manning was one of them. The other shall remain nameless.

“Why do you like those guys?” Brian asked.

My only real experience with computer book publishers—before I wrote this book—was as a reader. Because I’m mostly self-educated with regard to the industry I’m in, I’ve read a lot of computer books (my degree is in English; how I got into programming, Java, and portals is another—longer—story). I answered from that perspective.

“I think the quality from those guys is consistently higher than the rest. And, of course, I’d want Liferay to be represented by that kind of quality. So I’d want to be able to take the time to deliver something that they’d be willing to publish.”

“Okay, then why don’t we make it a goal to reach out to those publishers, once we get you some help? I think working with a publisher will help provide us with more visibility and fill a real need our community has for some good, polished material to get them up to speed on Liferay.”

“All right, I can do that,” I replied.

Except I never really got the chance.

By the hand of what can only be described as Providence, not even a month later, Manning reached out to us. I say us because they didn’t reach out to me; they went after the Liferay rock stars, like Brian Chan, Nate Cavanaugh, and Ray Augé, which makes perfect sense. But those guys were far too busy to write a book: if they spent time doing that, Liferay wouldn’t be where it is today. Instead they sent Manning, specifically Mike Stephens, to little old me, who was supposed to be preparing a proposal to send to Manning anyway.

Funny how these things work out, isn’t it?

Through a long, circuitous route that I could never have planned, I get to fulfill a dream of being a published author. It’s not a novel (that may come someday too, I hope), but I’ve tried to make what could become a dry subject interesting. To me, there’s nothing dry about Liferay: it’s an exciting product that can do a ton of things, and I think it’s an ideal platform on which to build a web site. I hope that by the end of this book, you’ll think so too.