[PLUG] Brainfart ... PLUG cookbooks

[Keith Lofstrom]

I have /many/ verbose and vaguely-useful computer books on
my shelves - the authors run on for pages about a few
subjects, rather than provide well indexed terse paragraphs
about MANY subjects.

Over the years, the PLUG list has accumulated some nonsense
and MUCH wisdom.  I can imagine that content seeding three
books, for sale worldwide:

The PLUG Development Cookbook - designing software tools
The PLUG Deployment Cookbook - setting up systems
The PLUG Disaster Cookbook - quickly recovering systems

These fat books would contain rewritten, terse, half page
"recipes" for MANY tasks, with many citations of other books
and links to useful websites archived on The Internet Archive.
Product placement book citations, used responsibly, might
help sell other in-depth computer books.

There are many flavors of Linux and BSD in current use.
The cookbooks might come in multiple versions for multiple
"cuisines".  On the other hand, they should be designed to
share best practices and tools between communities; we have
much to learn from each other.

The Cookbook series might be updated annually, but not with
"year dates", instead a letter or version number.  Lists of
which distro versions they cover, and an online reverse
index of distro version to book letter, would help users and
sysadmins pair deployed machines and the most helpful books.

When a distro is updated, replace old cookbooks with updated
cookbooks - but keep the old cookbooks paired with old
backups, which will help with future recovery of old data.
Old books somewhere else, perhaps as a well-indexed online
library business.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com