I have /many/ verbose and vaguely-useful computer books on my shelves - the authors run on for pages about a few subjects, rather than provide well indexed terse paragraphs about MANY subjects.
Over the years, the PLUG list has accumulated some nonsense and MUCH wisdom. I can imagine that content seeding three books, for sale worldwide: The PLUG Development Cookbook - designing software tools The PLUG Deployment Cookbook - setting up systems The PLUG Disaster Cookbook - quickly recovering systems These fat books would contain rewritten, terse, half page "recipes" for MANY tasks, with many citations of other books and links to useful websites archived on The Internet Archive. Product placement book citations, used responsibly, might help sell other in-depth computer books. There are many flavors of Linux and BSD in current use. The cookbooks might come in multiple versions for multiple "cuisines". On the other hand, they should be designed to share best practices and tools between communities; we have much to learn from each other. The Cookbook series might be updated annually, but not with "year dates", instead a letter or version number. Lists of which distro versions they cover, and an online reverse index of distro version to book letter, would help users and sysadmins pair deployed machines and the most helpful books. When a distro is updated, replace old cookbooks with updated cookbooks - but keep the old cookbooks paired with old backups, which will help with future recovery of old data. Old books somewhere else, perhaps as a well-indexed online library business. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected]
