I can’t make announcements of the title just yet, but I am excited and pleased to say that I’ve got another devOps book coming soon. Look this fall for an announcement. Contract has been signed, I start progress on the long road this week.
Up and coming appearances.
I’m now maintaining a list of my up and coming appearances (e.g. places to find me and engage me about things I didn’t cover perfectly in my books) over on the Interactions in Real Time site on a permanent page Up and Coming Appearances.
Learning MCollective now available in Early Release
Learning MCollective is now available in Early Release.
This has pretty much every chapter and subchapter we expect to have in the final book, but my editor and I are still polishing some rough edges. As O’Reilly says on their website:
You’ll receive updates when content is added, as well as the completed ebooks. You get free lifetime access, multiple file formats, and free updates.
pre-orders for my new book on MCollective available
So I received an e-mail from someone wanting an early access copy of the book I’m writing, by name. That wasn’t public knowledge, so it confused me. I went a-Googling, and look what I found:
Whoops, looks like the secret is out– now you know why I’ve been crazy heads down this month.
There is a patch for your copy of Instant Puppet 3 Starter
So I have done three things:
- Gone through the entire ePub file and fixed everything which was marked up in the PreFinal version sent to Packt a few weeks before publishing.
- Found and fixed a few small errors introduced between the PreFinal and what a buyer received.
- Learned about the ePub file structure and produced a patch.
Yes, I am not kidding. You can PATCH your ePub like so:
$ mkdir epubfix $ unzip ../"Instant Puppet 3 Starter [eBook].epub" $ patch < ../InstantPuppet3Starter.patch $ zip -r ../"Instant Puppet 3 Starter -fixed [eBook].epub" *
It works well. When I started this, I had a fantasy of providing small patches to the file to keep it up to date for everyone. Great idea, since it would only change the different lines, right? Unfortunately, the ePub generator used by Packt eliminates linefeeds in the content. A fix to any sentence inside a chapter causes the entire chapter to be quoted in the patch file. Doh!
So giving away the patch just isn't going to work. I have provided the patch to Packt; I hope they will push out the new version to all buyers. I'll have the patch with me at PuppetConf too, if you have a receipt to show me...