I agree, the “camera ready” autogeneration that they have going on isn’t perfect. And I certainly hope we can do better.

It seems to me that it is also perfectly reasonable to think that we won’t be able to get it exactly right, even if we get it better. So I expecting that we may have to go through the whole thing once at the end and manually reflow some things.

That said, I think the tools we are using are doing a good job, so we are likely to get better autogenerated output too.

–Mark

Specifically, the ability of PragProg’s automated build tools to produce ‘the “Camera Ready” version of every book … after every author change’ doesn’t seem to be very high. I remember reading that Dave had to generate the book 10+ times just to get the page breaking to settle down. That said, he missed some huge ones:
pages 238 and 272 of Agile Web Development With Rails

They both have _really_ horrible page breaks. 238 has almost a half page of blank space before a B-head. Perhaps other people don’t care, but when I pay $40+ for a book (with the early access), I expect someone to have at least made it look OK.

He had images and tables and everything but not as I expected them.

Instead of a real image, he had “*** insert figure1.png” in a single paragraph with a special style. The font was Courier.

Basically, he was using Word as Notepad.

He explained to me that his publisher requests this: They have an elaborate VB macro which takes the text apart and creates the real book.

That made me wonder why they used Word at all. Jedit would have been sufficient plus they would have been able to use some kind of version control.

He told me that his publisher didn’t want to change the process just for one book.

Go figure.

I’m writing all my books in Jedit and Subversion (or CVS if I have to). For the processing step, I’ve written a bit of Java code which spits out HTML, XML or TeX. I can edit my texts on my Palm, I have all of my books with me all the time (if an inspiration strikes me :-) and I’ve never lost more than a few characters (not even a whole sentence) since I started writing.

Yea, I agree the “ripping them off” thing isn’t the best way to talk about what is happening. But Dave has a point too, other publishers are looking at the success the rails book and hoping that they can do the same thing too.

As far as I’m concerned the main “innovation” from the pragmatic folks is to use traditional version control methodologies on all the text in all their books. Lots of people have done this for one book or another, but as far as I know nobody has done it with EVERY book before.

And the move from some to all seems more like an incremental improvement than a revolution.

The beta book thing seems a little odd to claim as an innovation since people like Bruce Eckel have been doing pre-release PDFs of books for a long time, and others have been selling PDF’s.
Even with all that said, I can still totally understand Dave’s perspective. Imagine the excitement of a new venture you’ve invested a large chunk of your life in taking off, and then watching your good ideas being taken up by the bigger players who originally predicted that you’d fail because of them.  It can absolutely take a toll on you. — even if those core ideas weren’t breathtakingly revolutionary.   Given all that, I think his post overall wasn’t over the top, so I’m not too interested in finding fault with a couple of mis-placed phrases.
That said, I’d also like to address your direct question: “are we ripping off the Pragmatic Programmers?”

No, we are not. I know that’s what you were saying and I know the question was rhetorical, but I just want everyone to be clear about this.
We are just doing the “right thing,” as we see it and I started down this path before I knew how the Pragmatic Bookshelf was run.

But, I do owe Dave and Andy a good bit of credit for helping me get into the habit of using Version Control for all of my text documents everywhere (something they suggest it in the Pragmatic Programmer).

–Mark

And my later reference to “Pragmatic Bookshelf” should probably be changed to “Pragmatic Programmers”.

So let’s think about history a bit.

A number of years ago I was able to buy a PDF version of a book from Manning Publications (manning.com).

And for a number of years, Take Control Ebooks (takecontrolbooks.com) have been offering PDF-only publications.

So who is aping whom? Who is ripping off whom? Can anyone enlighten us as to the exact chronological order of these events?

And Mark, are you and Kevin “ripping off” the Pragmatic Bookshelf?

I’m starting to think Dave Thomas is a blowhard.

Keep up the great work, I really think using trac is a brilliant idea.

Ciao
Michele

We aren’t too stingy with the passwords, but we do need to keep the group size under control, and want to know that the people who get access aren’t fake. ;)

If you want access, send me an e-mail and let me know a bit about yourself, and I’ll see what I can do.

E-mail me at mark at compoundthinking dot-com.