This is the latest printed free software manual I’ve been working on – The Apache Reference Manual (for Apache version 2.2.17) (ISBN 9781906966034, RRP £19.95). It’s the biggest single volume I’ve published – over 850 pages. I’m donating $1 to the Apache Software Foundation for each copy sold.
I’ve published a paperback edition of the Org Mode 7 Reference Manual (subtitled “Organize your life in GNU Emacs”). For each copy sold $1 is donated to the Org project.
I’ve just published the PostgreSQL 9 Reference Manual (in 4 volumes) through my company Network Theory Ltd.
It’s over 1,600 pages, so proofreading it was quite a task! One of the side-benefits of publishing free software manuals is that I do get to know all the features of the software.
The main new PostgreSQL feature that I’ll be using is full text indexing, for a Django site I’m working on. I was previously running PostgreSQL 8.2 on my server and updated it to PostgreSQL 9 yesterday to get support for this. Thanks to the new pg_upgrade migration tool in PostgreSQL 9 that should also the last time I’ll need to do the full pg_dump/pg_restore upgrade (always a bit of a hassle on a large database).
Incidentally, for every volume of the manual sold I’m donating $1 to the PostgreSQL project. I was able to give over $2,000 from the sales of the previous edition for PostgreSQL version 8.