Requests for reviewers |
When you send a review or correction, please cite the version number. The first printed edition is 1.0. If you're looking at the on-line version, look at the most recent number in the version history.
Try to batch up your error reports, especially the typos. One email with a lot of corrections in it is better than a dozen single-character fixes.
Please cite chapters, sections, and examples by name rather than number. The chapter numbering has changed often enough during the writing that references by number sometimes confuse me.
Please don't send just diffs against the HTML. They don't map well back to the XML in my masters, and they're hard to read. A copy of the text around the changed location, with the change called out, is much more useful.
Suggest illustrations and pictures, appropriate diagrams and charts. The book-design people like it when they can break up long dry stretches of text with a visual.
If you think you have a better epigraph for any of the chapters, do tell me. Also, I'm lacking sources and dates for some of the quotes; if you can fill in an attribution, please do.
I'm also open to more case studies. But don't just say "You
should mention project foo in the discussion of bar"; explain
The following are
I use logical-style quoting in accordance with established hacker custom, and I distinguish between single ‘philosopher's’ quotes for mentions and double quotes for actual quotations. If you think I have observed the distinction incorrectly, correct me — but don't try to abolish it in favor of the American double-quotes-only style, which I loathe.
(Yes, I'm an American. So what? I grew up in Europe. I eat with my fork in my left hand, bar my 7s, like metric measures, and wince at mm/dd/yy dates too. There are some things my country just gets persistently wrong, alas.)
There are some stylesheet problems. Notably, the Next entry in the generated HTML for Appendix B points at the Bibliography section rather than Appendix B. A couple of potential solutions turn out to be worse than the problem.
Don't assume you've been ignored if you don't get a response; that may just mean that your suggestions were obviously correct and needed no comment. I tend not to reply to routine reports of typos, in any case.