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"I am so sensible, sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers.

At present, the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesmen of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law, and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.

On which side, indeed, should the public sympathy be when the question is, whether some book as popular as 'Robinson Crusoe,' or 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller, who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress?

Remember, too, that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find, that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living."

So these laws finally went through, and the pirates are here. Surprise!

Consider voluntarily opting out of the over-zealous protections offered by current copyright law. For example, check out O'Reilly's Open Book project. Among their options are the Founders' Copyright, where works return to the public domain after 14 or 28 years (instead of the current lifetime + 70 years). Even better, given the technological revolution between then and now, consider even less restrictive licenses that would enable your customers to get even greater benefit out of your works.

Yes, this option requires that the public make some "nice distinctions" by recognizing that your works are (would be) more freely available than the typical work, and that they should correspondingly pirate them less. If you take this path, remember to proclaim your moral highground loudly and proudly, so that people notice. Also, encouraging your coworkers, fellow authors, publishers, etc., along the same lines and increasing the number of works so available will help the public to more often encounter and understand this issue, and again reduce the incentive to pirate your works.

I agree.
Just to put things in the right context here is a link to the famous Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate.
http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/appa.html [oreilly.com]

ehi come on!
every self respeting geek has already read it 10 years ago,

Well, did kdawson and narramissic read it?

The summary makes me wonder if neither the submitter nor the editor knew of Tanenbaum and Minix:
"a Unix-type operating system, called Minix"
"Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a computer science professor at Vrije Universiteit"

I agree.
Just to put things in the right context here is a link to the famous Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate.
http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/appa.html

ehi come on!
every self respeting geek has already read it 10 years ago, and it's not like Tanenbaum never did anything else but that flame war.

Mini3 is a very interesting open source OS and I can only be happy it has received some founding and wish the project the best luck.

I agree.
Just to put things in the right context here is a link to the famous Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate.
http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/appa.html

Running the code yourself doesn't prevent that, you know, even if you have access to the source code.

It lets you do something about it.

If you really want to understand RMS's position all you need to know is the story of the jammed printer.

Any time a question comes up in your mind about what would stallman do - just ask yourself how the parable of the jammed printer applies.

Don't use Xerox printers?

Running the code yourself doesn't prevent that, you know, even if you have access to the source code.

It lets you do something about it.

If you really want to understand RMS's position all you need to know is the story of the jammed printer.

Any time a question comes up in your mind about what would stallman do - just ask yourself how the parable of the jammed printer applies.

I recommend Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management (Theory in Practice) by Scott Berkun. Berkun has quite a bit of experience working on and managing teams. You can check out his blog for more info. and to get a taste of what his writing is like.
 
There are a ton of books out there - his blog has a sample chapter to read so you can see if this will work for you. I thought it was easy to read and covered quite a bit without getting bogged down. The table of contents breaks things down to a pretty low level - so that is another good way to see if it hits on what you need or if it might cover a lot of stuff you don't care about. I know I wish some of the people I've worked for had read it and took it to heart - especially the stuff about how not to annoy people.

http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch01.html

This Windows 7 application limit reminds me strongly of the Windows NT Workstation. Apparently they haven't learned from it.

I think Tim O'Reilly nailed this on his blog. Chopra is an excellent choice for making real progress. We don't need much emerging technology, we need more/better use of technology to improve government process, improve regulation, build technology commons between government and business, etc. "Why Aneesh Chopra is a Great Choice for Federal CTO" http://radar.oreilly.com/

From what I know about the technology world, you have hit the nail on the head! So why is O'Reilly wrong? What is the fallacy in his thinking?

I don't know if he is wrong, but going from that article, I just get a slight wave of nausea. When ever I see market-speak in a 'technical' document it invariably means that it's aimed at the non-technical sector with just enough buzz phrases to keep them warm and fuzzy. Just check out some of the key phrases:

"The responsibilities of the CIO are to use information technology to transform the ways in which the government does business. The CTO will develop national strategies for using advanced technologies to transform our economy and our society, such as fostering private sector innovation, reducing administrative costs and medical errors using health IT, and using technology to change the way teachers teach and students learn"

[actually, that's from a White House Doc. For me that says: we don't know what we are on about :) ]

Will any of this this ' private sector innovation ' lead to computers that can store-and-retrieve records in a secure and reliable manner and I would have thought that errors in medical records would have been a high priority from the beginning. From a link to a brief bio they refer to 'business intelligence software solution'. Yet another high-level-pseudo-technical-sounding phrase. I usually see that kind of thing in 'computer' magazines that contain no actual computer information aimed at the non-technical CTO sector. I don't actually read them but I have had my own CTO quote bits out of one to me, at least until he found out I know something.

My main point was in reference to appointing a non-techie to the post of CTO. For me, as a dyed-in-the-wool techie. regardless of how many qualifications you have, if you've never (from scratch) built an electronic device or wrote some code, then you aren't a real techie.

I've seen too many cases of people talking the correct pseudo-technical sounding babel to management, and it being accepted, as neither party know what they are on about, and willfully denying what their own people tell them. As after all, the consultant comes in trailing masses of certifications and awards. Generally it's a lot easier to write about how to do something, than actually implement it.

about this. My first reaction was that it was wrong not to appoint a technologist as CTO. Then I read O'Reilly's article, which argues cogently that the appointment makes a lot of sense.

This guy is a sensible choice, but perhaps not the best one. On one hand, he clearly is a technophile; he's had some nifty ideas and isn't afraid to hear new ones.

On the other hand, he seems to very much be a politician first and a technologist second. The video embedded in O'Reilly's commentary is telling: in the first four minutes, he uses the word "humbled", passively, five times. He can't resist buzzwords: "begin a conversation for dialogue" indeed. And if I hear him say "long-term strategic roadmap" one more time I'm'a puke.

So... I dunno. He looks good on paper, but he makes me want to scrub my brain after listening to him. He probably is a good choice for getting Obama's nationalized healthcare records system up and running. In other technology issues, I'm'a go out on a limb and predict that he'll turn out to be a fast-talking mouthpiece with very little real impact.

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596006099/

O'Reilly would never put a picture of a cat on a book about "cat". It's way too obvious. (Well, nevermind.)

O'Reilly would never put a picture of a cat on a book about "cat". It's way too obvious. (Well, nevermind.)

O'Reilly would never put a picture of a cat on a book about "cat". It's way too obvious. (Well, nevermind.)

...it's an http://oreilly.com/ cook book.

FUCK YOU, LEAVE ME ALONE, LET ME SURF THE WEB AS THE FLYING SPAGHETTI WEASEL INTENDED

=Smidge=

Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.

He's lost grasp of the point of software. The point of software is not 'to run free software', its to get something done.

Pragmatism is very high on his list of important values, but he sees it differently than you do. Much of his career developed from wanting to be able to use a printer but being hamstrung by its broken software. In Stallman's world, non-Free software is inherently limited in its usefulness because you don't have the right to fix it or adapt it to your own needs. After being victim to vendor-enforced software obsolescence on several occasions, I'd say he's far more pragmatic than you're giving him credit for.

The gang of four book is a must have but I recommend starting to learn design patterns with Head First Design Patterns http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596007126/. It's an easy and fun read based off of the gang of four book. Personally I read the Head First book cover to cover but I use the GOF book for reference when I actually plan on writing something.

I didn't read through all the posts, so someone may have suggested these. I have three suggestions: School, Certifications, and Submersion.

First off try to get a degree of some sort, even if it's just a AAS Degree in Computer Science at a local community college. If you have any credits it may not take as long as you'd think.

If school isn't an option or you don't want to spend the time, pick a path and submerge yourself in it. If you want to go the DotNet path then pick-up VS2008 Developer Edition, Sql Server 2008 Developer Edition, and as many books as you can. Yes it will cost some money, but you're talking about a life changing career move so you'll need to invest some cash and time.

Also a huge piece most folks miss when telling someone how to get started are the conceptual aspects of coding. I'd say any good program has more time put into planning the concept then typing code itself. Spend as much time learning the theories behind coding, which generally are language independent. I'd suggest getting Beautiful Code and also reviewing the books at OReilly on this topic - http://oreilly.com/store/series/theory.html .

Then once you pick a language and start getting familiar with it, start coding! Put together anything, whether it's a program to calculate your budget, your bowling team's scores, anything. Find some practical use for hte code and start hacking. Then when start looking at certifications. Microsoft has several for developers: MCTS, MCPD, MCAD, etc.

So how does this apply to breaking into the IT workforce??? Personally my experience is a degree is best, but many employers will look at certifications second. Either shows you're able to follow through with something. Secondly even if you have no professional experience, I've seen folks carry a portfolio of work to show. If the hiring is done by a CIO or HR department, they probably will look more at certs and degrees, but if the technical side of the department is involved have something to show, even if it's a small sample of printed out code. To a developer they can read this and see how good you are.

With all this said, don't expect to find an awesome job right out of the gate. Try to get a gopher job, which is generally fixing bugs, doing reports, etc... and from here you'll get the work experience you need to really move up in the industry. ALso make contacts!!! Find folks in your area who are coders, whether in a user group, local computer shop, or whatever. Most jobs I've seen folks get around our area are through contacts. The verbiage "It's who you know not what you know" does hold true.

Have fun... , but my suggestion is to go to school part time at your local community college and try to pick-up an AAS Degree in Computer Science. Depending on the credits you have now it may only be a matter of a few classes, or if you're starting from scratch some technical colleges will give you a certification. But for better or for worse many employers look for a degree of some sort.

Secondly I'd suggest picking a path and submerging yourself in it. For example if DotNet is your route, get

It included a mock press release: Perl and Python Announce Joint Development.

And a joint "interview" of Larry and Guido.

O'Reilly Media even tossed in a bogus book announcement: Programming Parrot in a Nutshell.

A few days later, O'Reilly published The Story Behind the Parrot Prank.

The name was eventually adopted by this project.

It included a mock press release: Perl and Python Announce Joint Development.

And a joint "interview" of Larry and Guido.

O'Reilly Media even tossed in a bogus book announcement: Programming Parrot in a Nutshell.

A few days later, O'Reilly published The Story Behind the Parrot Prank.

The name was eventually adopted by this project.

Linus now carries a different distro.

What happened? Lots of articles came out about how some people were getting rich building iPhone apps. These people didn't have the time, temperment or skills necessary to build those apps - all they had was what they thought was a great idea. That being the case the price seems a bit high, but might not be out of line:

http://blogs.oreilly.com/iphone/mobile/2008/11/turning_ideas_into_application.html

What kind of people would pay for this entertainment? Its a few bucks. I wouldn't but it, but I could see if I were into the genre and the game was a very good example of it I could definitely get more than $5 worth of entertainment from it. Seen a movie lately? There's $10 for an hour and a half - and don't buy popcorn. If you're caught in an airplane, taxi, bus or similar situation it might be nice to have.

I hypothesize that the content providers (Fox/NBC) are caught between a rock and a hard place (of their own making...). One take in an op-ed piece at O'Reilly here. On the one hand, they have existing relationships through various cable and satellite companies that currently provide most of their revenue. On the other, they're seeing interest in on-demand viewing of their content via the web.

I think the pressure is coming from Comcast, Cox, et al. because they stand to lose their lucrative monthly CableTV fees. I'm running a Mac Mini with Boxee connected to my TV (after using an AppleTV quite successfully) and it caused me to cancel my TV service. Between my current DVD/music library, Netflix account, and studio-provided video streams, I have access to much more content than I could get for any price from the cable/sat company. Accessing the internet from my couch is a nice bonus.

Interesting aside: I occasionally miss being able to turn on the tv and let a channel pick content for me (including occasionally entertaining commercials). I can't decide if it's just nostalgia or if I enjoyed the random passivity of the experience. Or if I'll still feel the same in 6 months.

I agree with OpenBSD using PF...then get yourself The book of PF ( http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781593271657/ ) This book is the most comprehensive PF documentation I've had the chance to read. But like many others told. 1000 hit per day on a server is nothing to be worried about.

There is a POSIX subsystem in Windows.

Not in home edition. In Windows XP, the POSIX subsystem is called SFU (Windows Services for UNIX) and is a separate download. In Windows Vista, it's SUA (Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications) and comes with the OS. But SFU does not install on Windows XP Home Edition or Windows XP Media Center Edition without hacking the installer, nor does SUA come with Windows Vista Home Edition, Windows Vista Home Premium, or Windows Vista Business (source). So you can't very well distribute an app that relies on SFU/SUA to the public.

The open source movement is exactly what should be funded.

That's a bad idea. Government shouldn't be funding either open source or proprietary software. They should let people keep the money they work to earn and let them decide who they want to support.

I had an argument with a microsoftie a while ago, who was convinced that open source was destroying the software industry. I countered that all it was doing was creating a rich infrastructure on top of which other industry could be built.

Next tyme maybe you can remind him, or her, that open source software has been around longer than Microsoft. Members of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT were writing open source programs back in the 1950s and '60s.

Falcon

What I meant was that there are no Apple-supplied package managers. Fink is a good add-on, but for some folks it's just got too much stuff in it. There's a good discussion here . While we're on that subject, there's also MacPorts.

I hate how people FUD Google and otehrs for making things available that others have collected for years. Phone companies have known where you are since the invention of cell phones and GPS has been a feature you can't turn off for almost a decade. Your ISP knows more about you than facebook ever will. Your grocer is busy selling you down the river too. Private companies like ChoicePoint have been collecting it all for Uncle Same for a long time too. Welcome to Database Nation, it sucks.

What can and should be done about it? The most harmful stuff is happening behind you back and it needs to be fought with good privacy laws. Grocers, ISPs and others should not be allowed to keep extensive records and should never be allowed to sell them around. The fourth amendment needs to be re-instituted in a big way, so that your tax dollars are not wasted chasing down political opposition. Facebook is not that big a threat because it can be and will be replaced with distributed and free software. It's only a matter of time before Facebook goes the way of GeoCities, AOL and other walled gardens. If we keep freedom in mind, the right answers will come.

oreilly radar recently covered the topic, as did Richard Jones, a last.fm person. Some decent reading in both

You can already buy 400+ O'Reilly books that come in an "ebook bundle" of three DRM-free formats (PDF, EPUB, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket). Several hundred other titles (including our Head First books) are available just as PDFs. Follow the link referenced in the main story for more details and a Slashdot-discount (see the first paragraph): http://toc.oreilly.com/2009/02/bookworm-now-part-of-oreilly-labs.html

Like the ones he just kind of hand-waves, by repeating 'Oh! It's so much better in the factories than it is outside, you know? And they've tried to fool me by bringing in good food on the days I'm there, you know. And the workers aren't going to tell me how shitty it really might be, because I don't really speak the language and they really don't want to lose their jobs... or get in shit with the mob like this rebuttal suggests might happen. You know.'

With all these rights landgrabs that Amazon is making with their digital books on Amazon (and heck, digital media in general)

Just to clarify what appears to be a misconception, Amazon has insisted on DRM-free music for Amazon MP3 since the beginning... so while the Kindle does appear to be a rights land-grab in some ways, not all of their digital media is treated equally.

Furthermore, Amazon does provide some DRM-free ebooks for the Kindle (e.g. several O'Reilly titles). Whether to include DRM on the Kindle ebooks appears to be a decision made by the publisher, not by Amazon, so don't blame Amazon for simply making the platform available. Based on their other activities, I'd say they're probably pushing for less ebook DRM behind the scenes.

I'll second this. Essential PHP Security is a good book to get you started in coding securely with PHP.

Sean Kelly has previously stipulated that Java has become the COBOL of the 21st century. (See his webcast about 'Better Web App Development'.)

That looks to be from 2007. This "Java is the new COBOL" has been going around for a lot longer:

http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/editors/java_1004.html

The State of Java
Edited by chromatic
October 2004

"Has the big business-friendly approach turned Java into the new COBOL?"

i use a greasemonkey script called NoMiddleMan

Its a bit more hackable by myself and can be adapted quite simply to perform other url cleanup.

http://commons.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Greasemonkey_Hacks/Linkmania!#Remove_URL_Redirections

Convection is only one form of heat transfer. The other two are conduction and radition. Our sun's energy, for example, reaches us primarily via radiation.

I think the most interesting thing about NASA's use of computers is that they don't allow any dynamic memory allocation. That makes certain things easier (e.g., squashing bugs), and other things much, much harder (e.g., writing a useful program).

4.0 was supposedly 'just a developer preview', and I personally think they dropped the ball on 4.1. Everyone was expecting it to just be 'ready'.

Agreed. Fortunately openSUSE still includes KDE3.5.x and I'll stick with that until KDE4 improves or KDE3 support is dropped entirely.

If Linus is an advanced user, why was he pressured to upgrade from 3.5 to 4.x in the first place? Couldn't he have just kept using 3.5 if that's what he preferred, rather than the GNOME which he hated?

I've read that Linus historically uses quite n00b friendly distros. He's never even run Debian due to its (perceived or otherwise) installation complexity. He's stated that he just wants to work on the kernel and not fiddle with the distro. See this interview.

According to the Computerworld article, Linus upgraded Fedora $version and it bumped him to KDE4 without offering a choice. I think it all boils down to Linus' desire for the distribution to Just Work(tm). I'd imagine he simply doesn't have time to fight the distribution itself to shoehorn it into something resembling a usable environment.

Cheers

Now we need congress to get revision control to increase transparency in the legislative process.

One interesting solution to this problem is Prophet - an open source distributed hosting solution.

More info here: http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/07/oscon-day-2-prophet-your-path.html

The complete rewrite came after Netscape was open sourced and became Mozilla. It is this complete rewrite that has allowed Firefox to progress the way it has. If you're really curious, see http://commons.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Open_Sources_2.0/Open_Source:_Competition_and_Evolution/The_Mozilla_Project:_Past_and_Future.

A lot of people in the twitterverse seem to think otherwise, but this is not a major breakage of the Internet. See my commentary at O'Reilly: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2008/12/the-sky-is-not-falling-on-toda.html

The Camel Book is a Must Have. And Must Read.

That said, I would strongly suggest Mastering Algorithms with Perl for anyone that needs a brush up on algorithms. It is easily the best book on them, even if you don't program in Perl!

...Mastering Regular Expressions. Now in it's third edition and a great read for really understanding how regexes work. What I liked about it was the explanation of how various regex engines optimize the expressions... who knew that Tcl has a super-advanced regex processor?

Case in point.

O'reilly calls out OpenOffice as primitive and seems like they need to use the proofing tools they recommend A more privimitve and less supported OpenOffice.org 2.0 version of the template is available at https://prod.oreilly.com/external/tools/temp lates/openoffice/ORA/trunk/ (username: guest, leave password blank).

I ended up using MS Word for the ugly monkey book, because O'Reilly only offered me that or LaTex, and I didn't want the hassle of figuring out the latter, which I'd never used. It worked out okay; I just used their template, and made a point of religiously applying the styles they'd set up. And yeah, I kept copies of the Word files (one per chapter) in revision control, though I don't think I ever used that for anything other than backup purposes.

The biggest lesson I gained from it was that while outlining and proposing a book is exciting, and getting it accepted by the publisher was really exciting, actually writing the thing was way more work than I'd expected. I'd written and edited professionally for years in the magazine business, so the writing part was familiar, but the difference between a 3,000-word article and a 500-page book turned out to be much bigger in practice than it had looked in theory. Especially late in the process, when it was all about plowing through everything again to get it all to the highest possible standard, the book was a huge undertaking.

It didn't sell particularly well, which was a disappointment, but the fact that I had believed (and continue to believe) in the book's premise made it possible for me to invest the work required. And in hindsight, I think of the book as a success, at least for me personally. Not because it sold a lot of copies, but because the process of writing it taught me more about its subject matter than I could have learned any other way.

I never would have finished it if I hadn't been sustained by my naive hopes of big sales, and I'm glad I wrote it, so I guess I'm glad I was naive. Presumably you have high hopes for your own book. That's great. Hang onto those. They will be essential as you close in on completion, and the mountain of remaining work just seems to reach higher and higher.

Good luck!

I'll second what bbutton said about scheduling, time, version control and the experience.
Writing RFID Essentials for O'Reilly was hard but very rewarding, I recommend them as a publisher if you don't already have one.

If you are working with O'Reilly they will want you to use their style templates from the beginning and will want to work with you section by section. Their templates a few years ago worked best with Word, but OpenOffice support was coming along fast and may be complete now. A books starts with a proposal and a chapter sample for O'Reilly.

If you are working with another publisher they will probably want a complete first draft. Typed, double-spaced, manuscript format, with text to indicated where the graphics will be.

If you don't have a publisher yet. Most will want a query letter and sample chapter before you send them a completed manuscript, but they will expect you to have a completed manuscript.

A note on graphics. Your own drawings and graphs will probably be replaced by professional artwork so be prepared to go a few rounds to get them right. What seems obvious to you won't necessarily be obvious to even a technically savvy artist with a heavy workload.

And be sure to start gathering citation information and copyright releases now for images and quotes. You'll need permission for everything and it can take time to get a response.

A nice summary on what to do:
http://oreilly.com/oreilly/author/permission/

Whoever you work with, expect the book to change significantly from first draft to final as you find ways to refine it, and don't be afraid to interview the biggest names in your field. Always record the interview for accuracy and send them a recording or transcript along with the release form. A good rule of thumb is to interview anyone who you think would be a tough critic for the book, or who you think is just too important to talk to you. You'll be surprised how helpful they will be, and the book will be better for it. You will be more confident you've been fair about addressing their arguments when the book is published.

Most publishers will also hire independent experts in your field to peer review the book and make sure it's ready for the public. O'Reilly is especially good about this, and their feedback will help you catch some of the subtle errors that creep in over a long hard writing process.

A personal note: If you are sane human being you will want to give the whole thing up several times before you're done. Don't give up. It really is amazing to see your book in print and you will be stunned at the kind of positive impact you can have on other people's lives just by getting the facts right and making something easier to understand. There is also a rush like nothing else when the words are coming out right and you're flowing.

Best of luck and congratulations on starting the adventure.

I'm about to finish my fourth book for O'Reilly, Beautiful Teams: Inspiring and Cautionary Tales from Veteran Team Leaders (which should be out in stores by March).

As far as tools go, my coauthor, Jenny, and I wrote our first book using Microsoft Word, but could just as easily have been using OpenOffice, Pages or any other word processor. One thing that was enormously useful was EndNote for managing the bibliography. Our next two books were in O'Reilly's Head First series (PMP and C#), and we wrote them entirely in Adobe InDesign. (People think that there's a whole team of people designing and laying out Head First books -- it was just us, our editor, and an awesome but overworked graphic designer, Lou, who helped improve our layouts once we had them in reasonable shape.) InDesign isn't exactly the easiest tool for a book author, but it was sufficient. But it made me really appreciate word processors!

A few things that really became clear to me over the course of working on these books:

a) Pay attention to what you're delivering to your editor, and what they'll do with it. Publishers have their own set of templates and production stuff to get camera-ready copy together. Head First was a very interesting lesson in that, because Jenny and I actually produced a lot of camera-ready copy ourselves. But for most books, whatever you turn over to your publisher will get transmogrified into their own internal format.

b) The production editor people I've worked with and talked to (not just at O'Reilly, but at other publishers, too) have been extremely competent, and it's their job to take whatever it is you give them and make it work. It needs to be copyedited, typeset, and reviewed, and sent to a printer. I highly recommend getting to know them, and being as flexible and agreeable as possible (they generally won't ask you to compromise your vision for the book -- it's generally about technical stuff, like how to deal with footnotes, references, images, etc.)

c) You asked about version control. One of the best authors I've ever worked with, Karl Fogel -- he's a contributor to Beautiful Teams, and also just a great guy -- wrote a fantastic book called Producing Open Source Software, which you can buy from O'Reilly or download for free from the website. (Anyone who's interested in starting or contributing to an open source project absolutely needs to read that book. Disclosure: I was a technical reviewer for it.) In true open source fashion, Karl made his version control repository for the book available, and that's a good model to copy. Jenny and I didn't do anything quite so formalized; we just shared folders, and that was sufficient for us (even with hundreds and hundreds of image files for each Head First book).

d) This is the most important thing: make sure you have a clear idea of what it is you want to write! It's easy to get started on a project, only to have it trail off because you don't really have a whole book's worth of material. The more you can outline, the more research you do, and the more you prepare, the better the book will be.

Now, that's all assuming that you have a publisher lined up and a contract signed. If you don't, I highly recommend reading through the excellent Writing for O'Reilly section on their website. They walk you through all of the steps of proposing a book and the mechanics of actually working with a publisher -- and from everyone I've talked to, it's very similar