Introduction

I started NSBlog about five years ago with the intent of just having a place to occasionally write about code and technical matters. Attempting to limit myself to meaty posts ensured that content was sporadic, as meaty topics were hard to come by.

Eventually these posts drew in a relatively substantial amount of traffic. I wanted to satisfy this newfound readership, but thinking of interesting things to write about was tough. The solution to this dilemma was lurking in the cause: pull topics from the readership!

Thus I announced Friday Q&A. Each week I would take a reader-submitted topic and use that for a blog post. I didn't have high expectations but it seemed like it was worth a shot.

Response was tremendous! Each post gets a sizeable amount of readers who have posted many intelligent and interesting comments. And although there have been a couple of pauses in the schedule (and a shift to a biweekly schedule once the weekly schedule became too demanding), Friday Q&A has been more or less continuously published ever since. I have been honored to see a large number of unjustifiably kind comments and recommendations about the series.

The idea for a book version has been floating around for quite a while. After a disastrous encounter with the publishing industry, the thought of self-publishing began to look more attractive. With the introduction of the iPad and the success of iBooks, selling as an ePub through Apple's store seemed like the logical course of action.

This book is a compendium of all Friday Q&A articles from the first one on December 19, 2008 through the latest one as of this writing on August 27, 2010.

The content is mostly unedited from the original posts. This means that each chapter still talks about "last week", and encourages the reader to return "next week". There are two reasons for this. First, Friday Q&A is an inherently temporal series and this preserves that feel in the book. Second, fixing up all of the articles to appear as though part of a reference book would have been a lot of work, and like most programmers I am lazy.

Some articles link to code in my public Subversion repository. All of these links remain valid. However, you may wish to check my github page first, as I have moved several projects there and some of them are more up to date than the Subversion copy.

It's been a pleasure to write Friday Q&A over these past two years, and I hope to continue for many more. Although the "next week" is out of date, the reader-driven nature of the series is not. So as always, if you have an idea for a topic that you'd like to see covered in Friday Q&A, send it in!