Windows 10 Field Guide: How You Get Updates

One of the big questions with the recently-released Windows 10 Field Guide is how readers will get updates. I’ve been talking this over with Rafael and Martin, and I think we have a plan that should work for most.

As you may know, our intention is to update the book regularly going forward. We have a number of topic areas we want to add or expand on, and of course Windows 10 and its apps will be updated regularly going forward. The book needs to be kept up to date with that.

As it turns out, Leanpub supports this, and we can republish the book at any time. And, as it turns out, we’ve actually updated it at least three times since the initial publication, and we’ve revved the posters once. In both cases, part of the reason for the updates was reader feedback around typos and other mistakes. And we want to be sure to address those quickly, and feel that there will be more of that kind of update up front, and less moving forward as the book gets cleaner.

The thing is, most book purchasers have opted into Leanpub’s email notifications, meaning that you will receive an email message each time the book is updated and we note that we wish to send out a message. What we don’t want to do, however, is overwhelm anyone with too many emails. So we need to strike a balance between update frequency and email frequency.

Here’s the plan.

We’re going to update the book regularly, and probably very frequently over the first few weeks and months, thanks to the great feedback we’re already getting. But we’ll only send out, at most, one email per week. That email will list whatever changes we’ve made in the past week (or more, if the updates get less frequent). This way you can know what’s changed, and download the new version if you’d like. We think of it as “Patch Tuesday for the book.” Not sure if it will actually happen on Tuesday, but you get the idea.

For people that just go to the site and download the book, you’ll always get the latest version. (I haven’t yet updated the version number in the front matter of the book, but will do so going forward.)

And for major updates, I’ll post here to Thurrott.com too.

The goal here is to be transparent but not annoying. I think this will do it.

Thanks for reading!

Paul