

Pro Git - CC licensed book on Git by Scott Chacon - laktek
http://progit.org/book/

======
Periodic
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.

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

~~~
spydez
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.

~~~
jrockway
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.)

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

------
cschep
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.

------
hachiya
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

------
duairc
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.

------
ivank
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 }
        }

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

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

~~~
RyanMcGreal
wget <http://progit.org/book/>

~~~
nudded
you forgot the -r flag ;)

------
Adaptive
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.

------
utnick
wow, i'm surprised apress let him do this

cool

~~~
icey
They do it with other books as well:

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

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

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

Maybe I should make it a trifecta.

~~~
jamesbritt
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. :)

