Introduction to the Command Line Book Sprint

“I have written basic introductions to the command line in three different technical books on GNU/Linux and read dozens of others.   FLOSS Manual’s “Introduction to the Command Line” is at least as clear, complete, and accurate as any I’ve read or written. But while there are countless correct reference works on the subject, FLOSS’s book speaks to an audience of absolute beginners more effectively, and is ultimately more useful, than any other I have seen.”
–Benjamin Mako Hil

Some wonderful feedback about this book…which was written in 2 days.

When we planned the sprint in March 2009, we had decided that it was important to provide detailed outlines for sprints. We have subsequently revised that dictum, but in this case it proved quite valuable because there were so many people converging on the book for such a short time.

As news came in that people would be helping remotely, we realized that we’d have an unusually high number of concurrent authors, and suggested that we break up chapters into small files. The result is that this manual is broken into an unusally large number of separate web pages: about forty web pages for a book of 130 pages.

We had 4-5 people writing in the Book Sprint room and it was obvious from the start that many remote authors were busy writing.

The manual was over one hundred and sixty pages in size at the end of the second day, and all the sections except for two non-essential ones were considered ready for publication.  It was loved by the FSF and others, and quickly made it onto a list of recommended free manuals by one third-party web site.

We now have two bueatiful books from this sprint – both with the same content. The Free Software Foundation released their own version of the manual with their own cover and are selling it from their site.