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by

Gary V. Vaughan, Ben Elliston, Tom Tromey and Ian Lance Taylor

This is the Authors' homepage for The Goat Book by Gary V. Vaughan, Ben Elliston, Tom Tromey and Ian Lance Taylor, first published in October 2000 by New Riders publishing, now under the auspices of Sams Publishing (a subsidiary of Pearson Education).

Aside from the subject matter, the book is also interesting because it was written in collaboration over the internet, even though we have mostly never met each other in person, and we are physically spread across the entire globe. I (Gary) live in Britain, Ben lives in Australia, and Tom & Ian live in the U.S. We were brought together by our mutual support of Free Software, and our respective involvements in various of the Autotools.

Within these pages you will find a browsable online version of the entire book, an errata for the first printing, and electronic versions of all the significant examples employed by the book.

When the paper version of the book was written, the contemporary versions of the Autotools we used are now considered ancient. If you wish to follow the examples in the paper version of the book closely, then you should ensure that you have the following versions of the tools installed:

Since then, the online version of the book is slowly being updated to a more recent set of Autotools. Consequently, some of the examples have modernised versions that work with the latest autotools, but don't match the text of the paper version of the book.

The full texinfo source for the book is available via anonymous cvs:

  $ cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@sources.redhat.com:/cvs/autobook login
  Password: anoncvs
  $ cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@sources.redhat.com:/cvs/autobook co autobook

Search the contents of the book:

Wednesday, Feb 8th 2006, 13:52:00

Gary V. Vaughan

A slew of updates:

  • Fixed the long-standing missing examples bug with the online book.
  • Created brand new examples that work with autoconf-2.59, automake-1.9.6 and libtool-1.5.22:
  • Fixed some more typos in the book's text.
  • Uploaded a new autobook-1.5 version of the downloadable html version of the book incorporating all of these changes.
  • Added this new page to the website for announcing updates.

As ever, the full texinfo source for the book is available via anonymous cvs:

  $ cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@sources.redhat.com:/cvs/autobook login
  Password: anoncvs
  $ cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@sources.redhat.com:/cvs/autobook co autobook
Comments on these pages to the webmaster.

Copyright (C) 2000, 2006 Gary V. Vaughan.

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

Last modified: Tue Feb 8 13:52:00 GMT 2006