Re: [Fwd: SEUL: Books!]

["Martin Jackson" <mjackson@deskmedia.com>]

        We need some more cool Linux books.  If you've been to a bookstore
        recently, you'll know that there are a number of books on
installing,
        using, and configuring Linux.  But there's little about the hundreds
of
        cool programs available for it!
        Would it be appropriate in this project to have a sub group to focus
on
        creating end user (and maybe even professional developer) books that
        talk about all Linux can do?  How about (proposed title followed by
list
        of sections in the book):


     This sounds like a -pub job... I'm not suggesting the existing pub
members (all 3 of them , or whatever) should suddenly start writing
books(!), but that if anybody in SEUL *is* doing this, then -pub should know
about it. If you agree, I would suggest posting a reply to Micah's message
saying so.
    Marty writes:

    I agree, it would be a good thing to think about down the road, once we
have more people.  I have a pretty good rig for doing electronic publishing
(PageMaker and Acrobat for Windows, about 300 TT and PS1 fonts, and a
burner; composition and layout software aren't really there yet for Linux,
but are on the way).  I have thought about doing something like that myself,
actually, but like a number of other things, I have higher priorities at the
moment (like finishing school before I'm 30).

    At the moment, there are some very good O'Reilly books about the core
components:  various shells, programming languages, sendmail, the major
editors, Apache, etc.  Right now, I think part of the problem is that there
isn't a whole lot of end user software out for Linux at the moment, though
the recent rash of free toolkits and the promise of Gnome and KDE will
change that.  (Once we have something like Quicken and Word for Linux, it
will be viable as a home system.)

    A third problem is that a good number of the materials currently
available are poorly written.  Bad mechanics, mostly, but it looks very
unprofessional.  That sort of thing maybe OK for a mini-HOWTO, but it won't
fly in a conventional book (or its PDF equivalent).

    Is anyone else actively pursuing a book project right now?

    Martin Jackson:  mjackson@deskmedia.com
    =======================================
    Information Science Major
    Mankato State University
    =======================================