> Having a decent commercial book discourages projects like http:// > en.wikibooks.org/wiki/A_Beginner's_Guide_to_D
Having a book like TDPL encourages adoption and will eventually spawn user-made tutorials and free books (because people will have knowledge of the language by learning from TDPL). You can't write a good free book about a language unless you understand it well, and before TDPL you had to keep track of the newsgroups for any language changes and you had to try to figure out D on your own (I'm referring to D2). Honestly, I find the wikibooks approach rather silly. Someone starts a project, then leaves, and expects someone else to just jump in and continue writing. That's no good. You either commit to your project, or if you're solo and can't finish it on your own then you enlist the help of others. But you need to keep everyone informed of the progress. And you need some kind of plan/schedule. I've found this after a bit of googling: http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/announce/3412.html http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/41861.html So someone comes up with an idea, others think it's a good idea, a few commits here and there and it all stagnates from there on. It becomes a random bunch of code snippets each written in different style and some of the code probably broken (e.g. that case of writefln vs writeln some weeks ago that popped up in the NG). I don't find wikibooks a good learning place at all. But maybe that's just my experience from the few books I've tried reading there. On the other hand, a book like Pilgrim's Dive Into Python 3 is an excellent example of a free book. But the author took the time to plan and write it, he was really committed to his project (unlike these NG posts like "hey lets do this!" "yeah, lets do it!" "zzz").