At the moment I am writing R code that involves a lot of simulation for a project. This time I wanted to organize the work properly, put a package together, document it,… the whole shebang. Hadley Wickham has excellent documentation for this process in Advanced R, which works very well as a website. Up to this point there is nothing new; but the material is also available as a book.
At this point in my life I do not want to have a physical object if I can avoid it. On top of that, code tutorials work a lot better as a website, so one can copy, paste and experiment. PDF or ebooks are not very handy for this subject either. Here enters a revolutionary notion: I like to pay people who do a good job and, in the process, make my job easier but sometimes I do not want an object in exchange.
One short term solution: asking Hadley for his favorite charity and donating the cost of a copy of the book. That gets most people happy except, perhaps, the publisher. I then remembered this idea by Cory Doctorow, in which he acts as a middleman between people who wish to pay him for his stories (but don’t want a physical copy of books) and school libraries that wish to have copies of the books.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have an arrangement like that for programming and research books? For example, we could get R learners who prefer but can’t afford books and people willing to pay for them.
