Raganwald's "How to Do What You Love" is free today

This is great! Raganwald is already one of my favorites, here and on twitter. I love to see stuff like this. I guess I know what I'll be doing for the next hour or two.<p>Just a reminder, my ebook is free, too:<p>html on my blog: <a href="http://edweissman.com/53640595" rel="nofollow">http://edweissman.com/53640595</a><p>Or if you prefer a pdf, someone I don't even know (thank you, whoever you are) was kind enough to put one here: <a href="http://v25media.s3.amazonaws.com/edw519_mod.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://v25media.s3.amazonaws.com/edw519_mod.pdf</a>

Note to self: Leanpub.com disrupts book publishing industry, it took them just ~ 11 months (EDIT: 2 yrs - look below) to get traction. Surprisingly, their original post got just TWO karma points:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2329397" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2329397</a><p>Getting Mr Braithwaite to publish at Leanpub.com is also a sign of success.

I really appreciate Raganwald's willingness to put these essays together into a convenient format and give them away. I enjoyed and probably learned a lot from them.<p>However, the publisher has not done its job here. I'm reading the Mobi version on Kindle for iPhone, and the constant formatting errors make it difficult to follow the text. This includes missing punctuation, missing indentation on blockquotes that make it impossible to see where the quote ends, random font changes in and out of a monospace font, random spacing around headers, and the lack of a table of contents.<p>If you want to call a collection of blog posts a "book" and ask for money for it, you need to at least proofread your output files and make sure basic standards of copy-editing hold. As it stands I will avoid buying from Leanpub in the future.

I probably would not have bought this book, but I did get a copy because it's free. I hope there is a way to retroactively throw some scratch to the author should I find it useful. That seems like a good model, akin to music "piracy" where I find music I love and <i>then</i> buy it. Or, I guess I could "buy" it again...

Thanks for the book. I downloaded and read it this evening. I identified quite well with one of the bad examples, and felt puffed up because your suggestion for learning communication skills was just what I was telling myself to do. Now I just downloaded Ed's book, perhaps it will help fix my procrastination. :)

My favorite quote: "The single most important thing you must do to improve your programming career is improve your ability to communicate."<p>Anybody have tips on how I can improve my communication?

I just downloaded this book for free because I was suspicious of the contents and thought it'd be another airy book filled with old quotes and obvious but encouraging sentences.<p>Now that I've read the first 3 pages I want to pay for it. Is there a way of doing this from the site itself, or do I need to "re-buy" the book?

Downloaded for free. Read introduction. Beautiful. Paying now.

I love this line from the first essay:<p>&#62;Your résumé would look better on top of a funding proposal than under a cover letter.

I wish there was a regular credit card payment option. As it stands, due to brain dead PayPal policies, I cannot use PayPal from the country I'm in, and I would really like to pay for the book.

&#62; (we won't spam you, we promise)<p>It's a nice touch, but honestly, it just reminds me to use a wildcard.

Thank you, Mr. Raganwald.<p>This motivated me to publish a book I'm finishing under the same model.

This is the kind of business model that I like to contribute to!

I just tried to get it. I am on a tablet and all attempts to download it have failed. I will chime in and note that I am in pretty dire straits financially (homeless and my freelance work recently fell through -- I am pretty up a creek) and was very concerned it was going to charge me. The means to request it is not very clear in that regard.

I bought it just because a few people on twitter brought it up. I moved the slider so that the author received 4 bucks even.

fyi - Trying to read the epub file in ibooks and i get this error:<p>This page contains the following errors:<p>error on line 1 at column 1: Document is empty error on line 1 at column 1: Encoding error<p>Update: PDF works, but requires a lot of scrolling on the iphone.<p>Also, it's a 40 page "book".

Posted free on Github <a href="https://gist.github.com/2002310" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/2002310</a>

I feel guilty. I just got the book for free and I feel like I need to justify it. I really respect Raganwald and I would love to pay and he deserves it. I took it free because the honest truth is that business is really, supremely bad right now. I have a total of $60 in the bank and a few grand in bills due plus some other awful things. I justify (maybe wrongly) downloading it free by assuming the book will help me and when business picks up again I'll buy another copy for as much money as I can muster to the point that I'm almost uncomfortable with the price I pay. I promise this. And I'm sorry.<p>Do my other freeloaders feel guilty? Or are there none? Or are there some but don't feel bad at all?<p>Edit: Just read the "Why You Need a Degree to Work at BigCo" section and already it's worth a lot more than the asking price.