I never got any feedback on my earlier suggestion for a book on CVS. (Did you receive it?) Something along the lines of "Learning CVS" or "CVS in a Nutshell". Good idea? Bad idea?

I think "Applying RCS & SCCS" missed the mark on this topic with "TCCS" and "Multi-platform Code Management" had its own non-standard approach. CVS lacks a good intro- type book and CVS is now widely available on both Unix/Linux and Win32. What do you think? Have you had any other requests besides mine?

Thanks,
Wayne

Dear Wayne:

Well, you asked Tim, but your answer comes from Frank, Editor-in-Chief of Technical Publications. Tim's are big shoes to fill, but let me give it a try.

We absolutely agree with you about CVS. When we published RCS and SCCS, CVS was not really a factor, but since that book was published, interest in and adoption of CVS has mushroomed. Many of our readers have written to us about the lack of a good book on CVS. We're in the process of eliminating that lack. We have a CVS project underway.

This is a very interesting project for us, one that illustrates a new capability we've developed. Our French office signed the project and will be producing the book initially in French. Our English-language Technical Publications group will be translating the book as it is written. We'll review it both in French and English. It's too soon to announce a release date, but we're pretty confident that we've gotten the right book.

This book will be the third English-language book produced by one of our International offices, the first from our French office. Our first one, Protecting Networks with SATAN, by Martin Freiss, was published in German in August 1997, translated into English and reviewed again, and then published in English in May 1998. Our second, Programming with Qt, is being written in English by a German author and published by the German office. We're considering a fourth one, this time from our Japanese office.

We're really pleased to be publishing books in this new way. There are some topics (Qt is a good example) for which most of the good technical experience is outside the United States. We want to be able to find good authors in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia -- wherever the savvy user lives. With editorial operations in our German, French, Japanese, and Chinese offices, in addition to our U.S. editors, we can find the right author, regardless of the language that author writes in. Our international editors are trained to shape these manuscripts into O'Reilly books, so we suspect that you'll be unable to guess the office of origin of any O'Reilly book you pull off the shelves.

So, Wayne, we'll have a CVS book coming your way. Let us know of any other topics for which we should scour the globe.

Frank Willison

Return to: Frankly Speaking