Forum OpenACS Q&A: SQL/Tcl for Web Nerds & oradoc

Posted by C. R. Oldham on 12/23/03 06:10 PM

Greetings,

I notice that philip.greenspun.com is down today. If/when it comes back up is there someone in the community that can approach Philip and ask him if we can mirror/host the Panda book, Introduction to AOLserver, and SQL and Tcl for Web Nerds? Those seem like really important documents for the community.

I don't think we'd want to edit the Panda book or his original Introduction to AOLserver, but we definitely need to be able to edit SQL and Tcl for Web Nerds.

In addition the "complete Oracle documentation" from oradoc.photo.net doesn't appear to be available on the Wayback machine anymore. Should we revise that link to point to tahiti.oracle.com and note that you need an Oracle TechNet login (free registration) as well?

2: Re: SQL/Tcl for Web Nerds & oradoc (response to 1)

Posted by Mike Sisk on 12/24/03 04:04 PM

I'll ask.

When I had root access on the photo.net hardware (which is where philip.greenspun.com is) I did grab a copy of the books and have them on one of our servers.

I'm sure Philip won't mind us keeping copies of these on OpenACS.org, but allowing us to edit them is unreasonable, IMHO. Perhaps we could keep an Errata page with corrections for each book.

3: Re: SQL/Tcl for Web Nerds & oradoc (response to 1)

Posted by Jamie Rasmussen on 12/24/03 08:45 PM

Maybe Philip will give us permission if we promise to do the mirroring with ns_schedule_proc and ns_httpget. 😊 That way, we could continue to use comments at the bottom of his pages for errata or links, and his would always be the reference copy.

If Philip is in an agreeing mood, I'd also ask for permission to share in multiple formats - I long ago made a personal PDF from each of the books and it has proven its worth on many occasions.

Also, Tcl for Web Nerds has multiple authors.

4: Re: SQL/Tcl for Web Nerds & oradoc (response to 1)

Posted by Andrei Popov on 12/24/03 10:05 PM

fwiw, it (philg's site) is up now

5: Re: SQL/Tcl for Web Nerds & oradoc (response to 1)

Posted by Mike Sisk on 12/26/03 02:14 AM

Philip would like the only online copy of the books to remain at philip.greenspun.com so as not to confuse google.

But, to quote Philip:

"On the other hand if they want to make something substantially new, using my text as a starting point, and credit me and release the new thing under the Creative Commons license that would be fine."

6: Re: SQL/Tcl for Web Nerds &amp; oradoc (response to 5)

Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 12/31/03 01:30 AM

In that case, Mike or anybody else, could you at least make sure you personally have good backups of those online books, so if Philip should ever be hit by a bus (crash his airplane, or etc.) and his site go dark, the content won't be lost?