On Tue, 13 Apr 2004 19:36, Don Gould wrote: > I had a very interesting conversation with one of the buyers at the ccc > library about oos books and magazines today. > > I know what other sorts of books I'd like to see them stocking but what > does everyone else think? > > I'd like more 'application' books. That could be tough as no one seems to > be writting them. > > Do you guys bother taking the books out to read them?
yes i took out Marcel Gagne's book on migrating to linux "Moving to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye!", not necessarily because I needed converting to linux, but just to see what it said. Marcel is a regular columnist in LJ and writes well (although is a bit prolix in LJ, he is very clear in his writing). The book was interesting in that it did not try to be all things to all people, it concentrated on a couple of distros and one desktop (KDE). I picked up a bit of interesting stuff. A very good newbie book. I also took out a very good openoffice migration book, which was very helpful, and would be great for migrating clients to OOo. I also regularly take out programming books (python/perl, whatever) in an effort to get to grip, but usually they don't really inspire me. IMHO they need more newbie books. Plain and simple, with explanations of the simple command line stuff like grep, awk, bash & co, moving on to some gui stuff. Like any learning experience you need to start with the basics. Once you have the basics there are good resources on the net. To put it another way oyu don't know that you need awk, or sed, or any of the other funny little programs until you see what they do and what they are for. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of books that i would read, particularly as a newbie, these days at the central library. > > Cheers Don
