Re: Updating outdated GNOME programming books

[Simos Xenitellis <simos lists googlemail com>]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 11:46 PM, Jaap A. Haitsma<jaap haitsma org> wrote:
> In my mail about the GNOME Amazon store most of the comments were
> about the outdated GNOME books which I listed here:
> http://www.gnome.org/friends/amazon/
> (We can change the entries so just let me know which books you think I
> should add and I'll add them.)
>
> It seems that there is now just one reasonably up to date book which
> is the book of Andrew Krause.
> Maybe it's an idea to ask the authors of the older books to license
> their text under an open license such that the community can pick up
> the text and update it. We could put it for instance on wikibooks or
> host it on gnome.org. Furthermore the GNOME foundation could print it
> at lulu.com and try to sell the books.
>
> I think this could be very benificial to GNOME because having good
> books is important if you want to attract developers.
>
> What do you think of this idea?

That's a great idea!

We can also put on lulu.com

1. the GNOME 2 User Guide,
http://library.gnome.org/users/user-guide/stable/
A PDF can be generated, it's about 160 pages.

2. the GNOME 2 System Administration Guide,
http://library.gnome.org/admin/system-admin-guide/stable/
The PDF is about 75 pages.

The Accessibility Guide is about 60 pages, though it might need an
update for the content.

The documentation team should be able to generate PDF files using some
elegant stylesheet.

Simos