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Linux Textbooks?
whymw asks: "I am a computer science instructor at our local community college where I teach an introductory level Linux course. Due to worries about Microsoft licensing, my director is interested in moving other courses such as office packages to the Linux environment. However this question keeps poping up - 'What would we use for textbooks?' There is little to pick from and I see this as a major barrier to widespread adoption of Linux in the classroom. Do we need to create a linuxtexts.org? Should openoffice.org fork off a textbook project? By the way, I said TEXTbook, complete with labs, assignments, and hopefully a testbank." Linux has to make it into the education market at some point. If there are no Linux textbooks out right now, what recommendations would you have from the current crop of off-the-shelf books?
What is wrong with using non-textbooks and writing a lab manual with exercises. I have taken computer classes before that didn't use textbooks -- and I've taken classes that did use awful textbooks, where we would have been better off using a non-textbook.
As far as OpenOffice goes, I've just started using it after using Word for a long time, and I find it intuitive enough (and enough like Word) that a textbook on using it would be a waste of paper.
There are plenty of good FAQs out there, which are good learning resources. And isn't it the job of the instructor to design assignments, labs, and testbanks? In subjects other than the sciences, this is certainly the case, so I don't really see your concerns being a problem.
As an academic myself, a few different issues spring to mind. I'll try to organize them in a somewhat coherent fashion.
First, I would ask if you really need textbooks? While most professors still use textbooks, a lot of people do fine without using any textbooks at all. Yes, it requires more effort on the part of the professor to research all of the sources themself; however, in my experience, the results are certainly worth it. Rather than teaching a politically-correct, watered-down course, you can tailor it to precisely what you feel is important. And shouldn't that be a professor's obligation anyhow?
For sources, I would start with the LDP, the FSF, O'Reilly, and Addison-Wesley. These guys easily make up over 95% of my tech bookshelf.
Addison-Wesley also does textbooks. I don't know how good they are but if they pay as much attention to their textbooks as they do to their IT texts, they'll be excellent.
On another matter, if you're going to consider rolling your own textbooks, don't reinvent the wheel. Much, if not most, of the documenation out there is under a free-as-in-speech license. Use it. Also, I don't think that you need to start your own website. I can't speak for the LDP but it seems to me that they would be delighted to assist you in developing the texts that you need.
Finally, if you go to the effort of developing all of this content, please do the right thing and share it with the community. Ideally, this would through a free-as-in-speech license.