Pro Git - CC licensed book on Git by Scott Chacon | Hacker News Reader

Pro Git - CC licensed book on Git by Scott Chacon

progit.org

224 pointslaktek25 comments

Publishers, please, please allow us to buy electronic versions of your books. Just make it reasonably cheap ($5-10 instead of the full $50?) and in multiple formats (PDF and HTML are my favorites), and I will gladly buy them. I have a lot of trouble paying $50 just for a paper version of a book. Is there a chance this could be profitable?

The thing I love most about free books is not that they are free, but that they are generally available in electronic formats that I can then use on my many devices. I can read them on my laptop without having to carry around twice the weight, have them for reference on my desktops without having tons of shelf space and copies for work and home, and have them on my iPod Touch for reading in bed or on the train.

It's particularly an issue with large technical books, as they tend to be big and heavy and won't fit in my bike bag the way an iPod does.

This should be available as an electronic book from Apress, too - all formatted and pretty and whatnot. When the book is shipping, you'll be able to get a professional digital version if you wish. Of course, if you want to take this markdown and make a PDF of it, do feel free.

Why should the electronic version be significantly cheaper? The real cost of a book is paying a good author to do it.

Because the majority of the percentage of the price goes to the publisher, not the author. Since the publisher is incurring less cost for producing an electronic copy, they should charge less.

The paper is cheap. With print-on-demand, there is no worry about printing too many copies, or storing them.

Paying the editor, someone to typeset the book, someone to redraw the diagrams, technical reviewers, and so on gets expensive, though. I think authors should get more money (as an author), but the publishers do theoretically add value.

(Without the publisher, your book is just the man page or a blog post. And despite the time required for the author to prepare those materials, people are entirely unwilling to pay for them.)

Then why don't I get an electronic version when I buy a physical copy?

Friends of Ed offers one of their web development books on their website each Thursday as a $10 eBook. Apress also has a daily $10 offer, but Apress's are often outdated or about non-web technologies.

I just wanted to say I love how this post hardly has any comments because we're all busy reading the book.

I adore free books. One of the things that pushed me more towards the Python universe, instead of the Ruby universe, was that the quality of the free literature available for the language, and it's major web framework Django. (I know there are other great frameworks for both sides!)

This will be a great way to (finally) learn more about Git.

This is a great contribution to the hacker community. I've been using git for about 1 1/2 years, but I can't wait to read this book and learn more.

If you go to the github URL, this is also a great way to see how one can use a markup language like Markdown to write an entire book in the text editor of your choice, e.g. Vim.

Someone from reddit converted the book to PDF and made it available here:

redraftable.com/temp/progit.pdf

To anybody looking for a PDF version: I've written a script that converts the Markdown version on github into a PDF via LaTeX: http://github.com/duairc/progit/master/latex

I don't have the PDF on Github because it's so big, but you can get it here: http://netsoc.tcd.ie/~duairc/progit.en.pdf

Its output is mostly fine, but there are a couple of very long lines in verbatim environments that go off the margin. I'm working on a fix for this, but it's not too serious a problem really.

The letter spacing (-0.03em) is awful with ClearType, so I fixed it with Stylish:

    @namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
    @-moz-document domain("progit.org") {
    * { letter-spacing: 0 !important }
    }

I just fixed the css for this - should look better for you now.

is there a pdf or portable format, I like to read my digital books when I don't have an internet connection.

wget http://progit.org/book/

you forgot the -r flag ;)

One of the nicest online book companion sites I've seen. O'Reilly's book related sites, as much as I love O'Reilly books, look crufty in comparison.

wow, i'm surprised apress let him do this

cool

They do it with other books as well:

Practical Common Lisp: http://gigamonkeys.com/book/

Dive Into Python: http://diveintopython.org/

Coincidentally, these are the only two APress books I've ever bought.

Maybe I should make it a trifecta.

I bought PCL so as to encourage this sort of thing, even though I can read it off my laptop. Plus it's a good book. :)

Add one more to the list: The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right (http://www.djangobook.com/)

and http://pylonsbook.com/ (just got a dead tree of it yesterday, BTW)

I learned both CVS and SVN from their canonical, free books. (I barely remember their names. They're "the CVS book" and "the SVN book", and you all know how to find them. ;)

So it's no surprise that folks are now trying to create canonical, free books for the next generation of VC as well.

I will start forwarding this to people I know at once.

Just a data point: they wouldn't let me do it.

My book Beginning Ruby has sold about 10,000 copies with only a few hundred in e-book format, and despite pleading (and even begging) with them to be able to release my second edition in a "free" online format (since the e-book sells so appallingly compared to the print edition) - no go :-( Instead I can release a few chapters each month or something similarly annoying.

So kudos for Apress on this, but with the people bitching about the lack of free Ruby books, it's a shame they couldn't extend the same courtesy to me. Even just free as in beer, not even in speech as with this one..!

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