Thursday, June 23, 2011

New version

The new update is here - I've finished the first draft of the last chapter, and I've been working on the index. I've fixed about a thousand errors spread throughout the book since the last version as well. Since then someone posted a link here on a bulletin board and about 5000 people hit this site. If the download fails just wait a bit and try again. UCL's servers are pretty good and you'll definitely get a copy. Please don't torrent or repost to the internet; this is always going to be downloadable for free and I don't want half-baked versions out there. I'm updating this on a day to day basis and there's still a lot of mistakes in it.

The download is huge because I made the figures in Inkscape and it can't produce compressed PDFs. If anyone knows how to solve this problem, I'd be happy to hear about it...

Update - this is partially resolved now. I managed to compress it a bit using Quartz filters on the MAC without losing too much quality. Now its a mere 150Mb.

9 comments:

  1. Any plans to release this in an ereader-friendly format?

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  2. Cambridge University Press will publish an e-reader friendly version, but, of course, you will have to pay for that and it won't be done for a year or so. As part of the publishing deal, I made sure there will always be the full version on-line for free though, so if you can't afford it there will always be some version you can read.

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  3. why not just zip it?

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  4. Doesn't make much difference (<10%)

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  5. There's a treasure trove of information in here! Thank you.

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  6. Hi! The book sounds great - downloading it right now. Can't wait to start reading it!

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  7. A couple of thoughts, as this book is too large for me to download, even now :(

    1. xz -9e is extremely effective - more so than gzip/bzip2 - and 7-zip and similar programs are available for almost all platforms for decompression
    2. For display only, the image quality need not be all that great - do you think you could switch to using png and jpeg instead of inkscape pdfs, or would that be too hard?

    While I'm wishing for the moon :) do you think you could use pdf2djvu on it?

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  8. The problem is that some of the images are very high resolution (i.e. several megapixels). Obviously this isn't needed for viewing online but I left everything as high as possible for the printers. When I've finished writing it I'll go through, find which images are the problem and decrease the resolution and there'll be no more problems. I'm just busy writing the text 14 hours a day at the moment...

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  9. Really liking the probability part!

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