We recently re-launched all of our free ebooks at https://leanpub.com/u/devopscollective. These books have all been authored by a variety of people, myself included, and most were originally authors in Word. As we translated them into Markdown (which is what Leanpub uses for its source), a few snafus tend to come up here and there.
Note that these books create no profit for anyone: all authors donated them to The DevOps Collective. When someone chooses to pay for an ebook during checkout (they're priced at $0.00, but you can pay anything you like), those funds go to help The DevOps Collective's programs, including our operational costs, OnRamp Scholarship, and more. So the books are entirely a volunteer effort, owned and maintained by the community at large.
For example, in the table of contents for https://leanpub.com/thebigbookofpowershellgotchas/read, you'll see a lot of "I’" type nonsense, which typically comes from Word's "smart quotes" feature when those get translated into plain ASCII. You'll also find the odd formatting issue, like backslashes at the end of code lines, which are meant to represent line breaks, or missing backslashes in paths, because backslashes need to be doubled in order to prevent them from being seen as an escape character.
Anyway - they're all minor snafus, but it's difficult for me to carve off time to go through all the books and fix every little one.
Which is where you can help!
These books are all open source, and hosted at https://github.com/devops-collective-inc. Anyone can use GitHub to clone the book repo, make whatever changes they want, commit those changes to their local repo, and then submit a pull request back to the main online repo. I review those PRs weekly.
So this is a great chance for you to contribute to the community. If these ebooks have ever helped you, then you can "give back" a bit by helping us fine-tune them.
And here's a tip: if you make a change, please also clone the Spanish version of the ebook and make the same change. That way we can keep the Spanish versions updated as well. Thanks again to community contributor Alvaro Tatis Torres for creating those Spanish versions entirely on his own time!
You're also welcome to make more substantive contributions. For example, Secrets of PowerShell Remoting could use a chapter on setting up Remoting-over-SSH for both Windows and Linux/macOS. Once more folks start contributing, I'll be updating the credits on the book to reflect the broader, community-based authorship of each.
Please help spread the word - even if you can't carve off the time to help, maybe someone you know could proofread a chapter or two. Scanning the online reader or the PDF version will reveal most of the oddities, and you can then dive into the source on GitHub to make corrections.
THANK YOU!
