Preface

In the summer of 2009, Manning Publications contacted me with the offer to write a revision of the first edition of iText in Action, published in 2007.

I initially refused, much to the surprise of the publisher. He put forward several arguments in favor of a second edition: the book had received good reviews, the first printing sold out in about a year, and the book was still selling well, in spite of the fact that it was almost three years old and that its content was probably somewhat outdated.

So I had to clarify: “I want to write a second edition, but I don’t want it to be a revision.” I’m always disappointed when a revised version of a book is a rehash of the first version, with only a limited amount of new material. I wanted to write a book that was valuable for developers who already owned the first edition.

I had accumulated a series of new examples, demonstrating techniques that were either presented differently, or were missing from the first edition. Moreover, I had been giving iText training sessions for different companies, and I had discovered that the order of the chapters in the first book wasn’t ideal. The content needed to be reorganized, and the only good way to achieve that was to rewrite the book from scratch.