Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 10:08:47 -0500 (EST) From: Andy Oram <andyo@oreilly.com> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>, James Howard <howardjp@wam.umd.edu>, Jim Mock <jim@luna.cdrom.com> Cc: freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: We need more books! Message-ID: <200001311508.KAA26521@ruby.ora.com>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
I can post a little on this topic, though I don't want to
promise too much because we're just starting some projects.
No publisher really knows what it's going to publish until
the books are close to being done (or at least ready for
technical review.) Let me offer you a deal: you can bug me
personally once in a while to find out how these projects
are doing, but don't 1) publicize them in general or 2) bug
customer service (those poor guys).
Greg can testify that O'Reilly got interested in BSD
derivatives (mostly FreeBSD) a couple years ago, when we saw
that free software (now rechristened open-source) was
becoming really popular. I think we were pretty supportive
in the past with BSD Unix in a Nutshell and the BSD
documentation release, but I have to admit we didn't try to
do anything really creative that built on the specific needs
of these BSD communities. And we floundered around for a
while in the past couple years, both in signing authors who
didn't produce anything and trying to figure out what Greg
could do. (In fairness to an author I know who may read this
mail, we had him working on a BSD book and he was producing
material, but he decided to switch to a Perl book we all
felt was more important at the moment.)
I'm happy now with Greg's current idea, which I think will
be more focused than his admirable Walnut Creek book. Also,
we're talking to some other authors to do some other BSD
projects, including an all-new BSD Unix in a Nutshell. These
are pretty traditional projects: we have one writer on each
and we're not keeping drafts on the Internet for review,
although it would be interesting to consider a more open
process that's like producing free software. (I've been
curious to try this for a while.)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Oram O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. email: andyo@oreilly.com
Editor 90 Sherman Street phone: (617) 499-7479
Cambridge, MA 02140-3233 fax: (617) 661-1116
USA http://www.oreilly.com/~andyo/
Stories at Web site:
The Bug in the Seven Modules Code the Obscure The Disconnected
----------------------------------------------------------------------
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200001311508.KAA26521>