What Kind of Books do You Want?

ctrimble asks: "I'm the acquisitions editor for a technical publishing company (not the one with the animals, but we have had six of our books reviewed favourably, here on Slashdot) and part of my job is to determine what books my company should publish. This consists, mainly, of me sitting in my apartment eating peanut butter sandwiches, reading Slashdot, and writing perl scripts that generate titles in a Madlibs type fashion: "Hacking Ruby for Midgets" (forthcoming in July). Unfortunately, there's a bit of an impedance mismatch between my methodology and filling the needs of the programming community. Market research is tough to do in tech books since you need to forcast about a year in advance. So, let me pose the question to you -- what kind of books do you want? What spots do you see as needing to be filled? For that matter, do you even want dead-tree books, or are eBooks and/or online documentation sufficient?"

Comments

A short list:

[Dancin_Santa]

Programming KDE
Programming Gnome
Perl 6, it's not your father's Perl
Ruby, for exceptionally tall people
Linux kernel, line by line
Programming C#
Programming for Mono
AtheOS, line by line
Embedded systems in C

And so on and so on.

Dancin Santa

Using OpenLDAP

[rapid prototype]

a nice Linux book which covers administering OpenLDAP would be great. and please, dead tree, dead tree. when the server is down, you need a dead tree to read. when the server is up, you don't need a book.

-rp

Re:Yes, I want DEAD TREES!

[Snoopyh42]

Personally, I rather like reading books on my Palm Pilot. It's much smaller, I can hold 5-10 books at a time, and I never lose my place.

Sounds like this...

[ragnar]

The Java Cookbook sounds like what you are looking for. I own it and really enjoy it.

Here ya' go

[devphil]

Essential C++ by Herb Sutter.

The comp.lang.c++.moderated newsgroup ran a series of problems from the moderately thoughtful to the downright fugly, entitled "Guru of the Week" and contributed to by the best of the online C++ community. About 50 of the GotW article were then pulled into a book and published.

For C++ in general, get everything (right now, about 8 books) from the new "C++ In-Depth" series. Stroustrup is the series editor; Essential is one of the titles. The idea behind the series is to get away from the massive 1200-page MFC tomes meant solely to generate revenue for the publisher; all books in the In-Depth series must be less than 300 pages long (main body). Short, clear, and to the point.

Re:regardless of what the subject ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with most things other than "Perfect" binding is that they either don't have real spines (spiral bound) or they have angled covers (ring binders). The best I've seen is "Lay Flat" binding.

http://letters.oreilly.com/layflat_0600.html

It's more expensive, but it makes very nice manuals.

Linux for Windows Administrators (already exists)

[WorkingHome]

Sybex already has a book that covers Linux written for Win Admins. It's 'Linux for Windows NT/2000 Administrators', ISBN 0-7821-2730-4.

It's very well reviewed at Amazon.

-C

Re:I think it's safe to say

[Zapman]

> How about a case study book?

Well, I know it's sun/solaris specific, but their Sun Blueprints line is rather nice. They're short, they go over some of the basics, and the break it down to 2 or 3 case studies using some of the top solutions for the given problem.

I have the one on Enterprise backup, and while it's not something that I'd give to someone who wanted to understand a specific product, it's great when you're doing product analysis.

In the line, there are "Datacenter Layout", "Enterprise Backup", "Boot disk layout", "Designing Enterprise Solutions with Sun Cluster 3.0", etc etc.

Webpage: http://www.sun.com/blueprints/

Some sample chapters are online as well.

Re:I want hemp books!

[Wraithlyn]

Why is this modded as Funny? Should be insightful. Hemp was primarily villified and made illegal by an industrial conpiracy to protect monopolistic oil and wood interests.

"Hemp is the standard fiber of the world. It has great tensile strength and durability...and can be used to produce 25,000 products, ranging from dynamite to Cellophane.

"The natural materials in Hemp make it an economical source of pulp for any grade of paper manufactured, and the high percentage of alpha cellulose promises an unlimited supply of raw material for the thousands of cellulose (plastic) products our chemists have developed.

"All of these products, now imported, can be produced from home-grown Hemp. Fish nets, bow strings, canvas, strong rope, overalls, damask tablecloths, fine linen garments, towels, bed linen and thousands of other everyday items can be grown on American farms...all of this income can be made available to Americans."

"The paper industry offers even greater possibilities. As an industry, it amounts to over $1,000,000,000 a year, and of that, eighty percent is imported. But Hemp will produce every grade of paper, and government figures estimate that 10,000 acres devoted to Hemp will produce as much paper as 40,000 acres of average (timber) pulp land."

- Popular Mechanics, February 1938
(Taken from here)

Hemp can be used to replace wood pulp paper, and we're cutting down our planet's forests at a suicidal rate. Hemp can be used as a domestically produced, renewable fuel, and yet we fight wars over foreign oil and pollute the atmosphere with it.