Re: Cygwin Book?

["Mike Marchywka" <marchywka at hotmail dot com>]

> You could fill a book with chapters that are basically "how to use Linux on 
> Windows", but really, aren't 99% of Cygwin users *ix transplants anyway?  
> Everyone knows how to use the tools, which is

The marginal audience is the "gui-is-the-program" windoze people. The idea 
is
that you can
convince them that text and information are as important as graphics without
having to convince them to load a new OS and hope they can learn.

It wouldn't be a tutorial on any particular tool but rather intro to many
tools, I've found scripting and text processing imporant, that allow
some useful results for beginners. This was how I got started.
Maybe you could solicit cygwin stories to give you some ideas.

Personally, I think there is a great public good in getting people to use
computers to automate data processing, not create a set of menus
that require human intervention to balance a check book. You can
theoretically write scripts to talk with your bank,etc.



> From: Warren Young <warren@etr-usa.com>
> Reply-To: The Vulgar and Unprofessional Cygwin-Talk List 
> <cygwin-talk@cygwin.com>
> To: cygwin-talk@cygwin.com
> Subject: Re: Cygwin Book?
> Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2007 05:29:03 -0600
>
> Christopher Faylor wrote:
> > I have gotten periodic requests to write a cygwin group from various
> > publishers but it has always seemed like a daunting task to me.
>
> The trick is in deciding what to cover.
>
> It seems to me that just getting Cygwin installed could be stretched to 
> maybe fill a chapter.  The hardest part is just finding the packages you 
> need in the tree, and because you can do it iteratively, it doesn't come to 
> much of a practical problem.  If I were writing it, I'd probably make this 
> Appendix A, not Chapter 1.
>
> You could fill a book with chapters that are basically "how to use Linux on 
> Windows", but really, aren't 99% of Cygwin users *ix transplants anyway?  
> Everyone knows how to use the tools, which is why they've sought out Cygwin 
> in the first place.  I guess there are a few who get Cygwin foist upon them 
> as a prerequisite for something else -- some embedded systems compilers are 
> like this, for instance -- but I'd bet this is a tiny minority of users.
>
> I point all this out because I think I know what would be the most useful 
> book, and you, cgf, are indeed one of the few people who can do it justice: 
> a book on how Cygwin works and why it is the way it is.  Not just 
> cygwin1.dll internals, but how setup.exe packages work, the way various 
> POSIX features are distorted by the Windows lens (symlinks, mounts, IPC, 
> fork, PIDs, permissions...), etc.
>
> The Cygwin story is one of compromises, accommodations, and probably even 
> some outright hackery.  This is the story that those of us who wish to 
> understand Cygwin need to read.

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