When will the SilverStripe book be released on the web?

The new English version of the SilverStripe book is out. This is great news. A first book for any open source project is a real milestone, not many projects get that far.

I encourage the authors to publish it on the Internet, not for my sake, but for the community.

Great documentation = more developers

We all know as developers the frustrations of poor documentation. Every time a developer hits a road block with their code, they turn to documentation; failing that they turn to a community for help. If after several failures they cannot get something working, it's likely they'll give up and try something else.

Let's look at the proof

WordPress, Symfony, Ruby on rails, CouchDB.

What do all these open source projects have in common? Great documentation. They even have free books available online. One of the reasons why these projects have grown so quickly is because their documentation is so easy to read and very comprehensive.

Why should authors give away their hard work for free?

The community will inevitably grow if the book is good, so this means there are more potential buyers of the book. Symfony's books are advertised alongside its web pages. This seems to work very well. It's a good way to target those most likely to buy the book.

An online book also makes getting more feedback and suggestions to improve the book.

Where do we go from here?

As a SilverStripe developer myself I've become so frustrated at the state of the documentation, I've even considered setting up a documentation site myself. However, since I know there is a book available, and it might be published on the Internet, what is the point working hard re-writing what needs to be said?

It doesn't always make sense for authors to publish all of their work on the Internet, but in the case of growing open source projects with little good documentation, it makes a lot of sense. What do you think?