I’ve recently finished writing an article for Free Software Magazine, who, as part of sponsorship deals, are able to distribute a free book to their authors.

I thought that that would be easy enough, but on second thought, I’m actually not sure… These days I’m reticent to get books on things that are documented on the web – those sorts of books tend to get stale pretty quickly. I think I’m more in the market for a ‘classic’, but even there, I’m not really sure. I have a lot of good ones already (scroll down on this page: http://www.welton.it/freesoftware/), and as you can see from that list, “documentation” style books quickly become dated. To tell the truth, I haven’t actually bought any computer books in a while, having focused more on marketing, business, economics and the like, which aren’t “documented” online as thoroughly as most programming topics are.

So, I’m lookng for suggestions. One possibility is the recent Erlang book by Joe Armstrong, but even that is mostly covered by docs on the erlang.org web site.

Free Software Magazine’s publishing sponsors are: Apress, Addison-Wesley/Prentice Hall, O’Reilly, No Starch and Packt – and I can select any book from them, to my knowledge.

Suggestions? Thanks!