I'm looking at picking up a tech book. I thought that I was supposed to be out May 1st, but apparently the release date has been moved to Sept 15th. That's a bit of a wait that I wasn't expecting.
They are offering the book in pdf (as a beta) where you'll be able to download the final book when it comes out. Now the question is do I want to just get the pdf version, or should I pick up the dead tree version as well since they are cheaper as a package. It's going to be around 900 pages, so it's not exactly a pocket book either.
What do you think the pro's vs con's of the dead tree version?
The beta book program is something the Pragmatic guys have been doing for a while now. I like it a lot: 1) you get the beta version as soon as possible 2) the beta book gets updated several times and 3) the final version is very polished. The long beta period is to allow the book to polish, yes ... but it's probably also because Ruby 1.9 isn't quite baked yet and I would think the book would want to cover it.
ReplyDeleteI prefer physical books in the end, so for this book I'll probably get the PDF and the dead tree version.
I just bought the pdf and dead tree version...
ReplyDeleteConsidering the shipping cost of close to 12 $, I probably should have done the math to figure out if it would be cheaper to just get the pdf direct and then get the dead tree version from amazon when it comes out...
Ah well.