With the sole intent of making this book future proof, I have ported ( i am not sure this is the right term) this entire book into DocBook/XML.That the source being Markedup in XML, this ensures:
It will become platform independant and the source is not in any proprietory format like word.
It will be easy to have different outputs like HTML, PDF, RTF etc. With the never version of browsers supporting Raw XML as input with stylesheet being a seperate component, that this remains ready for that day when it becomes possible to have it converted on the fly.
That in the eventuality of me not being involved in the project at a later date, with the advent of professionals, there will be enough warm bodies to do this job.
My fond hope is that this should not turn out be just a futile excersize and it proves usefull to everybody; atleast to some people even they are a small minority, the least of all to Gerhard Mourani, who is the author of this splendid book.
The idea behind this exercize primarily has been :
To give back something to the Linux community which has been instrumental in spearheading the spirit of sharing.
To create awareness about possibilities existing with the available tools set.
But in the process some mistakes might have creeped in but there can be no excuse. Since this book has been looked at twice over; but still, i think the mistakes are entirely mine,
if at all and not Gerhard's. So if you spot some glaring mistakes whether be it in the form of wrong or mis-information, typos or grammatical mistakes please do inform me at
<needaguru@yahoo.com> or you can even inform gerhard at <gmourani@openna.com>. I am sure he will give a wallop on my backside( it is quite fragile!) so that such mistakes don't happen next time.
Also welcome are the suggestions on how we could improve on this, so that next time round it will much be better.
Here is hoping that this proves useful despite those already mentioned, creeped in mistakes, errors etc. and it kindles in you the same spirit which has embodied the growth of Linux as a powerful environement to work in. And if that happens i would consider myself highly obliged and this will prove to be a satisfying endevour for me personally. I have a feeling that the orginal author of this book Gerhard Mourani shares this thought of mine and probably agrees with me.