On Apr 27, 2007, at 3:10 AM, twinxor / gmail.com wrote:

> While the version at RubyCentral (a newer version, I think) is more
> restrictive:
>
> "Copyright  2001 by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. This material  
> may be
> distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the
> Open Publication License, v1.0 or later (the latest version is
> presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/)).
>
> Distribution of substantively modified versions of this document is
> prohibited without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.


I honestly don't remember making the change, but I don't see what  
impact that will have. Andy and I now own the copyright, and we're  
generally known as fairly helpful folk. So just ask us about the  
modifications you'd want to make, and see what we say.

However, if you're talking about the reference part of the book, be  
aware of something.

I originally write the PickAxe by reverse engineering the source code  
of Ruby. Soon after we published the book, we released the HTML  
version for free.

When it came time to do the second edition, I went through the source  
code again, looking for changes and documenting them. However, this  
struck me as being a silly thing to do, so when the second edition  
was finished, some volunteers and I spent a couple of weeks taking  
the documentation from the book and adding it back into the source  
code. To make this work, I wrote the first version of RDoc. The  
intent was that from now on, the source code would _be_ the master  
copy of the documentation: when anyone changed the source they'd also  
update the corresponding comment. Should there be a third edition,  
it's reference section will come directly from the source.

So, it you want to update this documentation, the best place to do it  
is in the source code of Ruby itself.

If you want to change the output, my recommendation would be to take  
RDoc's XML output and transform it. (Yes, the distributed RDoc has  
broken XML generation. I have a patch that fixes it, but I've lost  
track of who's maintaining RDoc)


Dave