[TOS] Textbook status

[Timothy A. Budd]

Thanks.  I'm in the middle of finals week here (two big courses - one  
with 60 students and one with 80), but late next week I need to get  
serious about putting material up for my open source source.  So let  
me know as soon as anything is ready and I'll give it a trial run next  
term.
--tim budd

Quoting Greg DeKoenigsberg <gdk at redhat.com>:

>
> We've got a lot of pieces here.  We're very close.  That's good.
>
> What we don't yet have is a textbook.  That's bad.  It's bad because we've
> got a trial customer -- Tim Budd, Oregon State -- and no completed
> deliverable yet.  And we've got two weeks before Tim's class starts.
>
> I believe that next week will be a crucial week for the textbook effort.
> I believe that we should seek to accomplish the following things by the
> end of next week:
>
> 1. Get every chapter to 100% status.  Having all exercises completed will
> be of particular importance.
>
> 2. Move this document off of the wiki and into DocBook.
>
> 3. Get it into version control.
>
> 4. Make a "release".  I'd say this would be release 0.8 or so.  :)
>
> I think we can get it done, but I'll need some help.  In particular, these
> are the things I'm worried about:
>
> 1. The "beginner's mind" chapters.  Dave and Chris, I think that these are
> crucially important -- even if they aren't complete and perfect, we need
> something here.  I've seen blog posts from both of you that would do in a
> pinch.  If we want one chapter instead of two, that's fine -- but I think
> we need *something*.  Need your guidance here -- can we have something
> next week?  At least something to start from?
>
> 2. The infrastructure for the basic version control exercises.  I know
> that Chris set it up, but I honestly haven't even looked at it yet -- but
> it'll take some time to make sure that we've got what we need.
>
> 3. I need DocBook help.  I don't know the first thing about it.  I know
> we've got some folks here who can help with this -- Jared, Sebastian,
> Karsten -- and now is the time when your help will be deeply appreciated.
>
> 4. I'm worried that the whole thing will kinda suck and won't hold
> together well -- but I'm always worried about that, and it's certainly no
> reason not to finish strong.  Besides, that's what we're testing here: can
> we build a text like we build software, with alpha and beta releases that
> are useful, if imperfect?  And we won't know until we do it.
>
> I'm pretty proud of what we've accomplished so far, but if we don't finish
> strong for Tim, I'm worried that we'll miss our first big opportunity for
> feedback, and I want to make sure that we do everything we can to capture
> this opportunity.
>
> If you have time to spare next week, send a note to the list reporting for
> duty, and let's figure it out.  I'll be on #teachingopensource all week
> long, looking to complete the push to Glorious Victory.
>
> --g
>
> --
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Timothy Budd, budd at eecs.oregonstate.edu, http://www.eecs.oregonstate.edu/~budd