Scatterism

A couple of years ago, I used to give various IT courses. I lectured PHP, Apache, Perl and MySQL, but my favorite courses have always been the Linux courses.

Although I’m wasn’t (and unfortunately still not) certified myself, I’ve lectured LPI and RHCE; once each. The main reason I did these two only once was because I never liked prepared materials, I never liked sticking to books that assume all students are equal.

Sometime back in 2004, I was given a chance to conduct a five-day course with NOSSTIA—an exceptional effort to bring brilliant ex-patriots back to their homeland. My course was the L in a full-fledged LAMP training.

The conditions were simple: Do your own thing, we need people to learn. And the best part of it was that I got to do whatever the hell I wanted, the course had to be written from scratch. So I ended up writing a small companion book: An Introduction to Linux.

Now this guy, the one who organized the whole thing, is Free Software/Red Bull junkie. Our discussion on whether I should publish the book or not only lasted a few minutes. The answer was obviously: “By all means!”

So without further due, here’s a draft of my book. It’s 90 pages, and little raw at the moment, mostly because I’m not an OOo Writer expert. But I’m going to start converting it to a wiki, and I’m hoping that those of you who like it can pass it around, and tell me what you think.

I have to apologize in advance for being busy during January. I’ll be trying to pass the first semester’s exams. Wish me luck.