Open Advice is a collection of essays edited by Lydia Pintscher which me and Luca (and the rest of the libav trolls developers) have heard of at last FOSDEM. I’ve downloaded it directly I came home, but I forgot about it as I was finishing the other books first… I remembered about it when I noticed I had it already on the Kindle, and then finally got a hold of reading it last week. I was actually hoping to write this review earlier but work came first (is it Friday already? Gee!).
Honestly, considering I didn’t catch the whole presentation at FOSDEM, I was expecting a more “community oriented” book, knowing Lydia, but instead I was (pleasantly) surprised that it encompass a much wider range of issues, all with the common thread of things well-known and well-placed developers would have liked to know when they started.
While for most people who have been involved for a long enough time there isn’t much new to know for, it’s helpful to remind yourself that people are not born with the knowledge, and to contribute properly to a project, they need to know what the “proper” way are. I think this is the kind of book that LUGs should keep around for the newcomers, and that they should suggest when people want to take a more proactive role.
Out of all the essays of the various authors, the only one I couldn’t finish reading, because I was disagreeing with what seemed to be the main point of the topic, was Jono Bacon’s — and you can probably guess, why, if you’ve read it already.
I’m not sure if I can say much more, beside suggesting everybody to take a read to it, whether they are developers, contributors, users or just are interested in trying to take a few more steps into our world.
Thanks for the heads up on the book. 3 articles in I find myself nodding along, “Yes why can everyone not see that?”O/T: I searched your blog the other day and for some reason cannot see anything over a year old. I feel there is too much valuable information for it to be chopped so arbitrarily and would try to make you aware of it if you are not.
The content is still all present as I never delete content, and actually I was going through the older posts myself, to review if I could edit an anthology to push to Amazon’s Kindle Shop, to pave the way for more work on Autotools Mythbuster … so it should all be in.I’ve recently moved a bit the naming scheme of the URLs but since there are redirects all over the place, Google shouldn’t have issues with them. The only thing I can think of is that the Archives list on the right only shows the latest 12 months, but all the other should also be accessible, if you either move over to the older ones, or you type in the different months.