Ubuntu Book Third Edition Posted Wed, 18 Jun 2008

Another year has past and another edition of the Official Ubuntu Book has been finished and will be released soon. Over the last two years, the two previous editions of the book have grown along-side Ubuntu. The book has continued to sell very well, received almost universally favorable reviews, and been translated into more than half a dozen languages

While Jono Bacon has mostly been pulled into other projects, Corey Burger stepped up to help play the major supporting role in this version of the book's production. The whole text was updated to reflect changes in Ubuntu over the last year including a major rewrite of the chapter on Kubuntu and important work on the Edubuntu chapter. If you use either, you'll understand that there's plenty of churn to report.

In a sort of experiment, Barnes and Noble will also be selling a custom edition with an extra chapter by Matthew Helmke on the Ubuntu Forums which I hope to include in the next edition of the book. It's an excellent introduction to the best support resource Ubuntu has to offer that I hope many beginners -- the group that always been the book's audience -- will find useful.

You can pre-order the custom edition from B&N or get the book from Amazon or many other sources.

Like all previous editions, the book is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license and soft-copies should be up on the publisher's website once the book is released. Please support commercial free culture publishing by buying a copy if you find the book useful.

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Responses to This Post

Could never find a freely downloadable version of the previous editions :-(

Can you please point me to them?

Same for this third edition?

Don't expect publishers to provide the free download, never seen them doing that, that's up to the authors.

Thanks,
Marius
Posted by Marius Scurtescu at Wed Jun 18 19:07:24 2008
Cool! Thank you again for allowing me to be a part of the project, Mako. I appreciate the opportunity and am both pleased and proud to have my name attached to it.
Posted by matthew at Thu Jun 19 11:05:05 2008
I've searched long and hard, but I can't find this book freely available anywhere. The best I can find is a "trial" offered by O'Reilly's Safari service.

Can you help me out by providing a link to where we can download or at least view this book?
Posted by John Smith at Sun Feb 8 06:26:55 2009
My publisher has told me that the HTML versions are already up on the Pearson website. I'm not sure where that is but I can email about it.
Posted by Benjamin Mako Hill at Sun Feb 8 20:00:30 2009
Please do email your contacts and provide a URL. It's useless saying that this book is CC licensed if the "source code" isn't actually available, short of grabbing the book and scanning in the words.

To be honest, I find it rather disingenuous too. If this is CC documentation then it should be freely and easily available for the benefit of the community.
Posted by John Smith at Tue Feb 17 05:18:10 2009
My publisher has told me that the full electronic text of the third edition is not yet posted. The full texts of the first and second editions are posted and freely available on the Pearson website and she assures me she has bothered the people in the electronic text department to the put the HTML version of the 3rd edition up as well.

CC makes no requirements for proving electronic copies in any form or any requirements for proving "source code" in any situation either -- electronic or not. If you want a source code like requirement, you should look at a license like the GNU GFDL.

In any case, this seems to be an honest oversight on the publishers side and I believe them when they say they are trying to rectify this. I simply didn't realize that the third edition had taken so long to be posted (the 1st and 2nd went up reasonably quickly, IIRC). Everything has been in been done in the letter of the license.
Posted by Benjamin Mako Hill at Tue Feb 17 18:59:11 2009

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