[TOS] Teaching materials, or textbook?

[Jared Smith]

On Mon, 2009-05-11 at 13:21 -0400, Greg Dekoenigsberg wrote:
> I think this plan is quite practical.  Within six months or less, we 
> could have a damned fine textbook.
> 
> The question: who's willing to contribute?

I'm willing to contribute as my time permits, especially with regards to
the more technical aspects.  

Speaking of technical aspects, do we want to use something like DocBook
for the actual written format. DocBook is slightly more cumbersome than
say OpenOffice, but offers some advantages:

 o it's easy to make both HTML and PDF versions from the DocBook source
 o it's easy to keep in revision control (to know who changed what, and
when, and keep track of errata, etc.)
 o it's easy to remix content to make custom versions of the book
 o O'Reilly likes it!

If you decide to go the DocBook route, I'd be more than happy to help
put together the DocBook toolchain to make this happen.  (I've already
had a book published by O'Reilly under a Creative Commons license, so I
can probably help there too.)  I'd also be more than willing to give a
brief introduction to DocBook for anyone that's interested.


-- 
Jared Smith
Training Manager
Digium, Inc.