It’s been a busy time!
As well as many other things, the fantastical BDFL of dbatools Chrissy Lemaire @cl and myself have written enough of a chunk of Learn dbatools in a Month of Lunches that our publisher Manning Publications have agreed to release it as a MEAP. Not a text book, this book is written in a fun conversational style and split up into chapters that you can read in a lunch-time.
It is impossible for me to hear MEAP and not think of this 🙂
Roadrunner Speeding GIF from Hungry GIFs
but I expect you are wondering what a MEAP is?
What is MEAP? A book can take a year or more to write, so how do you learn that hot new technology today? The answer is MEAP, the Manning Early Access Program. In MEAP, you read a book chapter-by-chapter while it’s being written and get the final eBook as soon as it’s finished. If you pre-order the pBook, you’ll get it long before it’s available in stores.
Basically, to make it easy to get and for those that like to get in early, you can order the book and get the first 4 chapters (three in reality) RIGHT NOW!! (It also means that Chrissy and I have to write the rest of book – dang still going to be busy!)
Simply head over to https://beard.media/bookblog and use the code mlsewell and you can get access to the book too.
](https://beard.media/bookblog)
This will also give you access to the live book.
live book
The live book is fantastic, you can read the whole book from within your browser. See the three icons that appear to the right of the book?
3 little icons (no porridge)
The left hand one enables you to bookmark an important part so that you can come back to it easily using the bookmarks link in the top right
bookmarks
The middle icon enables you to write notes for yourself, maybe ways that you can use the information or maybe comments about an awesome Italian.
Shoes
The last one is the way that you can make comments and engage us , the authors in conversation, ask questions, request clarification or wonder about Dutch data manglers
I think its down to PII
If you select a piece of text, another menu opens up
The first icon lets you highlight the text, to make it easier to find later
Hover over the highlight and you can choose different colours for different things.
or even create pretty pictures for Mathias
Mathias – Why isn’t he an MVP?
You can choose to annotate, which is sort of like highlighting and writing a note with the next icon
When you want to share a link to a particular part of the book with someone else, you can highlight part of it and click the link icon
It’s easy to start PowerShell as another user as long as you remember when to press SHIFT
Which will highlight the paragraph and open a dialogue at the bottom where you can create and copy the link.
By far the most important part for Chrissy and I is the last link. When you find something wrong you can mark it for our attention. Yes, even with Chrissy and I proof reading each others words, the fabulous proof reader Cláudio Silva (b | t) and awesome tech editor Mike Shepard (b | t) as well as many community reviewers there are still, and will continue to be, issues. So when you find them, highlight them and click the right hand most link
with with more more than than one one
This will open up as shown so that you can fill in what was wrong (Please don’t report this error again Shane b | t has beaten you to it!)
You will have noticed on social media and elsewhere that we have left some easter eggs in the book
Yup, we have some easter eggs in #dbatoolsMol
We hope you enjoy them https://t.co/iZa3u8iLPC
— Rob Sewell (@sqldbawithbeard) August 29, 2019
Whenever you find them or whenever you want to talk about the book on social media, please use the hashtag #dbatoolsMoL – you never know what goodies may end up in your inbox.
Oh and if you have got this far and don’t know what dbatools in a Month of Lunches is, listen to the hair and read more https://dbatools.io/meap/