Hello

--- Eugene Nine <enine@ninefamily.com> wrote:
> >
> > http://www.sourcebeat.com/

> I don't get it.  If they send updates then it would
> have to be an electronic 
> book because they sure wouldn't want to mail out
> paper updates and have you 
> rip the book apart and glue them in.  An open source
> electronic book you can 
> download from the authors site for free, so you
> would basically be paying 
> them to e-mail you updates???

I think they mean "books about open source programs",
as far as I understand it the books are copyrighted.

BTW, I'm toying with the idea of doing a book on
KSpread. When I started with spreadsheets, most
programs came with very good manuals, that took you
gently through the application. Multiplan (remember
that one :) ), was like this, so was Lotus 1-2-3 or
Symphony (that really got me started). Even not so
long ago, I remember Quattro Pro had a very good and
extensive manual. Today most applications assume that
everyone is quite thoroughly acquainted with the
concept of a spreadsheet program. Books about MS
Office, or OpenOffice, will cover the functionality of
the spreadsheet-part in 100 to 150 pages, because
there is all that other stuff that they have to cram
in.

So I'm a bit nostalgic about the kind of book that
would show you all the functionalities of the program,
by using extensive examples, screenshots, etc. and
really explain things well. I don't see this as
something that can replace the help/manual, nor as a
pure tutorial, but as something in between...

My prefered format for such a book would be HTML or
XML (I no specialist), I mean something that you can
read on the internet, preferably also offered on one
page, so that you can print it efficiently, and of
cours .pdf and .ps on top of that. And perhaps
integrated into the program, either as a link to a
web-page, or as an extra help-item. And free
of-course, I mean under GNU Free Documentation
Licence. The guy on sourcebeat.com has a point of
course when he points out that written books about
(open source) programs are rapidly obsolete.

Marc

Marc

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