Wednesday, July 22, 2009

I'm Looking For Reviewers

Sorry about my long absence, but as you will see, I have an excuse:

Hello All,

I have just finished the first draft of a book I'm writing titled, "The Linux Command Line" to be released under a Creative Commons license. With the initial writing completed, it's time for some editing and review. That means I'm looking for folks willing to perform some reviewing. In particular, I need technical reviewers who can gently point out my technical and historical errors, and I need less experienced users who can find areas where my explanations are unclear. Don't worry about grammar and spelling and such, I have a "real" editor for that. At this stage I need gurus and sample users to test this thing.

The book is fairly long (about 475 pages) so a good review will take some time and effort on the part of any volunteers. If you make a serious contribution, I will add your name to the list of contributors in the "Acknowledgments" section of the first chapter. Don't laugh, that's all I got for doing a technical review on O'Reilly's "Bash Cookbook."

Unlike Bash Cookbook however, my book will be freely distributable in PDF format but I am reserving the right to sell printed versions.

Please feel free to take a look at the draft. It can be downloaded from my Sourceforge site at:

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/linuxcommand/TLCL-09.07.pdf?use_mirror=master

If you decide that you'd like to help out with the review, let me know and I will provide further details.

Many thanks!

7 comments:

  1. I'd be willing to participate. I'm a PhD student in Hebrew trying to find a little computing freedom.

    -Tod

    todtwist@gmail.com

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  2. Glad your back and thank you for sharing your book! Looking forward to the read and will get back with you on any proofs.

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  4. Hi!

    This book is amazing. I'm starting reading it tomorrow.
    The only thing I find inconvenient is paging. The first pages and the table of contents aren't considered as pages, and because of that you can't just jump to that page by entering its number in your pdf editor. book page != pdf file page. What do I do? Hope you understood the problem ;)

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  5. Future versions of the PDF will have links from the table of contents to the text. In the meantime, there is a sixteen page offset in the page numbering. I use evince as my PDF reader and it displays an "index" in the sidebar that allows direct navigation of the text.

    Hope this helps.

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  6. i would recommend using ODF instead of PDF =)
    it is more in the spirit of free and open source

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  7. William,

    This book comes at a perfect time for me. I was looking for a good CLI learning resource. I haven't worked with linux in years and even then I didn't get very in depth with it. I would love to lend a hand as a new, but familiar, reviewer. I am currently a Technical Support Rep with a large web hosting company. Part of moving into the Admin arena is knowing the CLI, so I've been learning. I'm also a corporate technical writer who creates internal training material and "How to..." docs for our website.

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