[Lazarus] English lazarus book available.

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 01/06/2011 12:44, Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote:
> I'd assign most of the work to the authors, because structuring 
> *technical* content and translations IMO can not be done by somebody 
> else, regardless of according skills.

Lukasz mentioned a very valid  point. If you have multiple authors, then
consistency across chapters are very  important to the book layout. That
includes  styling, screenshots,  code samples  etc... So somebody  would
have sit down and develop a "chapter style template" using OpenOffice or
LaTeX or whatever  the authors use. Once all chapters  are written, then
comes the book  layout, table of content, index etc...  by that time the
authors  of the  chapters are  probably  not interested  in that  boring
bit. All things that  a editor can do... Yes, with eBooks  there role is
becoming less important, but they are still needed to some degree.


> technical details of the text. The community also can contribute to the 
> structure of a book, because the users (readers) often have needs or 
> expectations *different* from the insiders view on the topics.

Then maybe the community must start creating a "community driven Lazarus
book". Judging by how small the FPC or Lazarus community is, compared to
other Open Source projects  - I doubt that will ever  get off the ground
though.


> documentation in dedicated places. I'd be happier with HTML, where it's 
> easier to update and reorganize the entire "book", but this again 
> doesn't allow for book-style sequential reading. Dunno about eBook 
> features at all.

I personally hate  HTML "books". Rather give me a PDF,  EPUB, CHM or INF
book. For a community book I would  suggest writing it in some text file
format that allows for revision control, and then later the final output
can  be  generated from  that  book  source. Many such  formats  already
exist: DocBook, LaTeX, IPF, AsciiDoc etc..

Anyway, I wish the authors well  and hope their efforts with the Lazarus
book has  good returns. I sure hope  a digital version will  also become
available -  maybe the authors can  then get a larger  percentage of the
profits too.


Regards,
  - Graeme -

-- 
fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal
http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/