Technical Books For Vanuatu

Vanuatu is a developing nation in the South Pacific, consisting of a group of islands about 3 hours’ flight from Brisbane, Australia. I’m currently visiting and staying with a friend, Dan, who works in IT here and is very involved in community computing and Internet initiatives.

While I’m here, I’m teaching one of Dan’s staff to program Javascript. Lacking the answer to a question the other day, I found myself wishing I had a copy of “Javascript: The Definitive Guide”. Problem is, I don’t think there’s one in the whole country. Even if I wanted to buy a copy I couldn’t. Nowhere local would sell them, and shipping books from outside the country is prohibitive both in expense and in logistics; many parcels to this remote location take forever or may get lost in transit.

Talking to Dan, he agreed that a small technical library of well chosen books would probably be a useful thing to have around here. So, I’m going to acquire such a technical library when I’m in the US at the end of this month, and bring it back to Vanuatu with me.

I’m soliciting donations of used technical books from people living in (or prepared to ship to, on short notice) the USA. I’ll be in the US around Oct 27 to Nov 1 2007, and will gather up the books and bring them back to Vanuatu with me.

The books will be donated to VITUS, the Vanuatu IT Users’ Society, who will loan them to community computer centres and the like.

Gently pre-loved computer books and technical manuals.

• Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) is in wide use here, especially in community computer centres and the like; books about FLOSS, open standards, etc are preferred to proprietary technologies.
• Books should be in reasonable reading condition. A bit of scuffing and dogearing is fine, but don’t try to offload books that are a complete mess.
  • NOTE: bindings disintegrate rapidly in Vanuatu’s tropical humidity; if your book’s going at the spine, it may turn into a pile of loose pages in no time flat.
• Books should be either recent editions, or of timeless value. Use some common sense here. If you wouldn’t give it to a friend or colleague, don’t send it to Vanuatu.
• We generally only want one copy of each book, but the more fundamental or widely used the technology is, the more likely that duplicates would be of use. For instance, an HTML reference would be a suitable candidate for multiple copies, while a highly specific, advanced guide to a niche subject would not.
• I’ll sort through the donations in the US before bringing them to Vanuatu, and may discard any that are unsuitable or in excess of requirements. I’ll try and donate any discards to a local library or similar, so they won’t go entirely to waste.
• Overall, I need to optimise for quality, not quantity; the local IT users are going to have to manage a sort of lending library for these books, and too many will be more trouble than it’s worth. Ideally I will come out of this with a box or two of very good computer books, not a pallet-load of crappy ones.

These topics have been identified as being of general use here:

• Linux (esp. generalised or Ubuntu-flavoured)
• System administration
• Networking
  • wireless networking
  • VSAT and satellite networking
  • CISCO
• Web technologies
  • Apache
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • Javascript
  • Flash
  • GIMP, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator
• Programming languages
  • P-family scripting languages (Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby)
  • C, C++
  • Java
  • Lisp/Scheme
  • C#/.Net/Mono
  • Visual Basic
• Databases
  • MySQL, Postgres
  • general SQL
  • MS databases (SQL server, Access)
• Other
  • Software engineering
  • Intellectual property
  • Solar energy

The following topics have been identified as particularly undesirable:

• Enterprise applications (eg. SAP, PeopleSoft)
• Oracle, Sybase, etc
• Heavyweight frameworks of any kind

Local people have specifically requested the following titles:

• “Programming Perl”, any blue-spined edition
• “Structure and Interpretation of computer programs”, by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Susman.
• “Paradigm of AI programming”, by Peter Norvig

1. Go through your bookshelves and put aside any books that match the above list
2. Check the book tracking page and see if anyone else is sending those books. If they’re excellent books on subjects of broad interest, a second copy may be reasonable, but no more than 2 copies of any one book, please! If you’re not sure, please contact me.
3. Note on the book tracking page which books you will send
4. Mail the books to the address below, to arrive no later than Tuesday October 30th OR give them to me in person in San Francisco (I’ll be around from Oct 27th)
5. Mark the books as sent
6. I’ll mark the books as received when I get them

Kirrily Robert
c/o R. Chalmers
140 Geary St, 9th Floor
San Francisco CA 94108
U.S.A.

NOTE: books must arrive by October 30th, 2007! If you’re in San Francisco, we could also meet up in person to hand off the books.

For the same reasons that you read hardcopy books, only moreso.

You and I have had a decade or so to get used to reading on a screen, and it’s still a less than ideal setup for most of us.

Furthermore, Internet access here is patchy, and most people only have access to it for limited times. Many computer users only have access from time to time, and there are few computers in the home. (Take a look at [http://infotrope.net/blog/2007/10/21/middle-class-life-vanuatu-style/ this photo tour] to understand what Vanuatu homes are like.)

Hardcopy books will allow people to take them away and read them at leisure, whether they are in front of a computer or not.

For the same reason as above.

If you can ship books to California by October, then yes. I understand that this may be prohibitively expensive, however.

If this project works out and is useful and appreciated, I may attempt to do another run in a little while. If I do this, I will try to open it up to people in Australia, Europe, or wherever.

You might also like to look at the next question, about donating money (or rather, books purchased online), as you could do that from anywhere.

There’s a section on the book tracking page for people who are prepared to throw a bit of cash at the effort.

Around Oct 28th I’ll look at the list of books donated so far and see if there are any big gaps. For instance, we may not have received an HTML reference. Then I’ll email you and ask you to buy a book or books from Amazon and ship them to California on one-day shipping.

If enough books are gathered from people’s shelves, you won’t be called on at all.

This is a small project, and I don’t want it to grow out of control. As I said earlier, I just want 1-2 boxes, at most, of high quality technical books. Any more will be unmanageable at this point in time.

For this reason, I’m not promoting this project really widely. I’ll be posting about it on my blog and telling my friends, and I don’t mind them spreading the word around to people they know, but I really don’t have the capacity to deal with an enormous influx. So if you’re thinking of posting to a very widely read blog/mailing list/etc, please check with me first.

(That’s also why I’ve just set this up as a little page on my personal wiki, rather than making a big deal of it with its own domain name, a full blown wiki, and so on.)

In conclusion, I’d like to offer enormous thanks to anyone who goes to the trouble of sending a book or three along. They’ll really be appreciated.

Any questions, etc, please mail me.