Open Source Textbook Launched
Last week, after countless hours of work by a number of people, the Teaching Open Source community released the first public version of an "open" (creative commons licensed) textbook on open source software. The book is currently available online in HTMl format or in a downloadable PDF format and is already being used by Tim Budd in his open source course taught at Oregon State University.
The textbook provides an introduction to open source software including online communities, interacting with code repositories, building software, debugging, patching, and documenting. It is still in the early stages, but it already provides a great resource for instructors who wish to introduce students to open source. There are many reasons for teaching open source in high school and college level courses. For more insight into those reasons, read my post, Why Students should get Involved in Open Source, and the forward of the Teaching Open Source textbook.
I'm excited to see this resource provided to instructors and the open source community as a whole. This is a great first step for getting open source into the curriculum at universities where there may be a willing professor, but they previously lacked a textbook and a supportive community to provide the infrastructure needed for teaching things like bug tracking and revision control systems used in open source communities. In addition to this textbook, programs such as Google Summer of Code are providing students world-wide with excellent opportunities to get involved with open source software -- giving them great career opportunities once they graduate.
It was a pleasure for me to be involved in the textbook as the author of Fixing the Code, the chapter on creating and submitting patches. I'm looking forward to the future evolution of the textbook and hopefully seeing more teachers take advantage of this great, FREE resource.
If you are an instructor looking to use the book, or someone who is interested in helping out in the Teaching Open Source community, you can start by checking out the Teaching Open Source Wiki. There is also a