Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is the oldest producer of free eBooks on the Internet. According to their web site they have more than 15,000 works in their collection and most of these are older literary works which are in the public domain in the United States.

Some of the most popular texts include such classics as, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare to name but a few.

If you feel like reading some classic literature, browse their catalog and see what you can find.

Python Tutorial 2.4 in eBook Format

I installed Plucker on my Palm IIIxe last week. Plucker is an offline web and and ebook viewer for Palm based handhelds. The parser that comes with Plucker can create ebooks from a number of sources including RSS, RDF, text files and HTML to name a few. On the Plucker web site there is a samples page which provides several example Plucker documents to download.

I was eager to try out the parser on some offline documentation I am currently reading. The current Python Tutorial seemed like a good choice as I reference it a fair amount at the moment. Following the Plucker documentation for creating an ebook I soon had a reasonable ebook copy I could upload to my PDA. After previewing it I decided that the original HTML source document would need to be modified a bit to better present the content on the PDA.

I stripped out the graphical header and footer from the original tutorial, leaving just the textual links for navigation. I ran the parser again with the following options,

Spider.py -v --no-urlinfo --noimages --zlib-compression \
  -H Python-Docs-2.4/tut/tut.html -N "Python 2.4 Tutorial" -f PyTut_24

and it produced a resulting Palm Database (.PDB) format file which was only 108K in size.

If you are using Linux and have the pilot link conduits installed, you can sync it to your Palm PDA using the following syntax,

pilot-xfer -p /dev/pilot -i PyTut_24.pdb

The Python Tutorial 2.4 ebook can be downloaded below.

• Python Tutorial 2.4