If you'd like to give it a try, we need volunteers for:
Setting a common format for people summissions.
We have tentatively
splitted the materials from Stroustrup's Chapter 2, in seven sections.
Therefore any volunteers can pick a section and write his/her own material
on the topics covered in that section. If each chapters are handled in
this way, we are going to have a large number of materials submissions,
we have to agree on a common format and procedures to handle these
submissions. This is one possible approach, its advantage is a volunteer
can write two or three pages with a couple of small sample programs
quickly before becoming exhausted. Its possible disadvantage is the
uneven quality of the materials and the consistency of the whole product.
If you have other suggestions you think more practical, please bring
them forward. The mailing list for the discussion of the the hypertext
book project is mset-cpp-book@mcmuse.mc.maricopa.edu
.
To subscribe to this list you should sent a mail message with
the only word "SUBSCRIBE
"
in the body of the message to mset-cpp-book-request@mcmuse.mc.maricopa.edu
An editorial team should be set up to plan for the long term development and growth of the hypertext book. Once people have submitted a section, say, and it has been used and commented. How do we handle the modifications? Initially, it should the original author who handle these. But what if he doesn't want or he is not interested anymore. Can we do like in a normal publishing contract and say the copyrights belong to the GNA and do what the editorial team decides? If so, how do we spell exactly the rights and obligations of the authors, the editors and the GNA? Again discussion about these issues should go to mset-cpp-book@mcmuse.mc.maricopa.edu (the instruction to subscribe to this list is given above).
We need help with the registration process of the course. At the moment, all registrations inquiries goes to the course coordinator who has very little time left to do anything else. A registrar is needed, someone who could write a few scripts to improve the automation of this process.
In a similar vain, someone who could write a few scripts (or forms) to help with keeping track of who is working on what. Someone who is reading this page and would like to write section 5 of chapter 2 should be able to find out if someone else is already working on it, and if not, he/she should have to fill a form to say: "I am working on Section 5, Chap 2 and it should be ready Nov 1st". These informations should be easily accessible from the WWW.
Bringing the Answer Book to the WWW is requiring more work than expected. Robert Arsenault (rlarsnl@cs1.mta.ca) did it for Chapter 2, people would be needed for the other chapters. This involves reading the Exercises from Stroustrup and concatenating the different segments of code from Hansen's Answer Book so we can get at least one complete answer for all the exercises from Stroustrup. Once the code of a complete solution is in one file, you should htmlize it and link it to the rest of the WWW pages. Someone with basic Unix and html skills can help to do a few questions. If you are willing to help with this, write to Robert at the above email address.
You have plenty of time and you would like to volunteer to write a whole chapter, great! We came up with the idea of splitting each chapter to be written in sections so more people can have a chance to contribute (many small contributions instead of a few big ones). We feel it is a more typical situation in an organization based on volunteers. If you want to write a whole chapter, you should start right away so we can take advantage of your labour as soon as possible. Just notify the course coordinator at dperron@mta.ca and think about subscribing to the book mailing list mset-cpp-book.