I Turned My Apple Metal Articles Into a Book

A while ago, I started writing a series of articles about Apple Metal.

The idea was pretty simple: I wanted to explain Metal in the way I wish someone had explained it to me when I was just starting out.

Metal is not impossible to learn, but it can be hard to enter. There are examples, documentation pages, code snippets, and conference talks — but when you are new to it, it is easy to miss the bigger picture. You may understand what a command buffer is, or how to create a pipeline state, but still not feel that you understand how all the pieces fit together.

So I started writing the kind of material I would have wanted myself: not just “here is the code”, but “here is the idea behind it”.

The articles were meant for people who are at the beginning of their Metal journey. I wanted them to be practical, but also focused on principles: rendering, compute, tools, diagnostics, profiling, GPU debugging, and the mental model behind it all.

At some point, after the articles were written, I looked at the whole thing and thought: this probably wants to be a book.

A series of articles is useful, but it is still a series of articles. A book can be more coherent. It can have a better order, smoother transitions, a cleaner structure, and a clearer path from the first concepts to more practical workflows.

So I tried the “proper” route.

I wrote to several publishers.

And then… nothing.

Not even a rejection email.

Just silence.

That was not very dramatic, but it was clear enough. If nobody was going to open the door, we could build our own small door instead.

So my friend Mikhail Rubanov and I decided to publish our books ourselves.

That is how Bookshelf.dev started.

For now, the book is digital only, and I think that is the right format for it. Technical books age, APIs change, tools improve, mistakes get found, and new chapters become necessary. A digital book is easier to fix, update, expand, and connect with links and references.

This also changes how I want to continue the Metal material. Instead of publishing future updates as separate articles scattered around the site, I plan to add them directly to the book.

The original articles are still here, and they are still free to read. But the book is now the revised, corrected, expanded, and better-structured version of the same material.

You can get it here:

Apple Metal: From Fundamentals to Practice

Bookshelf.dev is very small right now. We have only just launched, and there are not many books on the shelf yet. But that is the point of starting small.

We want to invite more authors, publish more practical technical books, and slowly build a place for developer-focused material that does not have to wait for permission from traditional publishers.

This Metal book is my first contribution to that shelf.