Manning's MEAP as a progress bar
Manning is a computer book editorial that allows you to purchase early-access versions of their books as they're being written, known as MEAP. This is a great way to engage with the readers early and get feedback from them at a time in which the book can still be changed.
Over time Manning has been doing a lot of book promotions by offering deep discounts for books in the MEAP phase. I have been buying tons of them. One of the cool things about MEAP books is that every now and then you get an email update with a new version of one of the books that you purchased. It's like a continuous Christmas!
Nowadays though, an interesting thing is happened. I moved away from my old java-spring-hibernate self, into the Lisp and Clojure and cool stuff world. And I did it in a clean-cut way. I quit my job, sank my head in books and blogs and Emacs, and finally emerged out of it with plenty of projects and even customers.
But I keep getting MEAP updates for books that now seem ancient to me. Every time I get one of those updates it happily reminds me how much I have progressed in the last year or so. I feel like I am in a different universe altogether and that somehow somebody keeps sending me Cobol books... good times!
