Classicamiga Forum Retro Edition
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Thread: List of Amiga Reference Books
MadAngus 00:25 1st September 2012
Update More books

Here is the list of books authorised for redistribution and are copyright Bruce Smith and collaborating authors, in addition layout, design and content of these books are copyright Bruce Smith.

Amiga Workbench Booster Pack - by Bruce Smith and Paul Andreas Overaa - Feb 1996 - 512 pages - ISBN 1873308418
Insider Guide Series: Amiga 600 - by Bruce Smith - Jan 1993 - 256 pages - ISBN 1873308140
Insider Guide Series: Amiga 1200 - by Bruce Smith - Feb 1993 - 256 pages - ISBN 1873308159
Insider Guide Series: Amiga Workbench 3 A-Z - by Bruce Smith - May 1994 - 256 pages - ISBN 1873308280
Mastering Amiga - by Bruce Smith and Mark Webb - April 1993 - 320 pages - ISBN 1873308175
Mastering Amiga DOS 2 - Volume 1 - by Bruce Smith and Mark Smiddy - August 1992; 2nd edition - 416 pages - ISBN 1873308108
Mastering Amiga DOS 2 - Volume 2 - by Bruce Smith and Mark Smiddy - August 1992; 2nd edition - 368 pages - ISBN 1873308094
Mastering Amiga DOS 3 Tutorial - by Mark Smiddy and Bruce Smith - Nov 1993 - 416 pages - ISBN 1873308205
Mastering Amiga Workbench 2 - by Bruce Smith - Sept 1992 - 320 pages - ISBN 1873308086
Total Amiga Amigados - By Bruce Smith - Oct 1995 - 416 pages - ISBN 1873308566
Total Amiga Workbench - by Bruce Smith - Oct 1995 - 352 pages - ISBN 1873308558

Also note as a condition of getting permission to distribute these books some restrictions have been put in place as follows.
Distribution of these books unless otherwise stated are restricted to ultimateamiga.co.uk, classicamiga.com and combinedworks.org.
Distributing these books alongside unauthorised work is prohibited regardless of who the author is.

-----------------------

Current status of other books in the search.

Stephen Hill author of 'Amiga Games Maker's Manual'
The publishers forwarded my request to the address they had, but no updates from the publishers or response from Stephen.

However there is a Stephen Hill known as self_shadow who is the 3D Technical Lead at Ubisoft Montreal, Canada. A coincidence, probably. I've attached a picture of this Stephen hill, could be the son of the one I am looking for or he has aged damn well.

Anybody able to confirm this Stephen Hill or am I miles out.

Jason Holborn author of 'Ultimate AMOS'
I contacted Jason Holborn through his website and got a response. He confirmed that he is the author of 'Ultimate AMOS' but he didn't get my first message. I forward the original message to him and am waiting for a response.

Dicon Peeke author of Writing role playing games for Amos
As yet, no response to my eMail, however as far as I can determine Richard 'Dicon' Peeke has not been active on the internet since October 2011. Dicon, hope your okay.

Anne Tucker and Len Tucker authors of 'AMOS in Action: A Practical Guide to Mastering AMOS on the Amiga'
Zero success

Peter J Hickman author of the "All About AMOS" Newsletters.
Zero success in finding Peter. Peter are you there, hello, is anybody out there?
Attached: stephen-hill.jpg (57.6 KB)
[Reply]
Harrison 10:04 2nd September 2012
Brilliant work mate. This will give a great start to begin a real official bookshelf/reference library on classicamiga. I will try to get something started this week on the official pages for this. :-)

A question I now have. I know some of these books are unofficially on other sites for download. We have been granted exclusive rights to host them, so I think we will need to protect this permission by either asking other sites to remove the books, or for them to redirect to our sites instead. I will chat with Zetr0 to ask him about this, as he knows his stuff regarding legal and copyright issues and laws.
[Reply]
MadAngus 16:52 2nd September 2012
Originally Posted by Harrison:
Brilliant work mate. This will give a great start to begin a real official bookshelf/reference library on classicamiga. I will try to get something started this week on the official pages for this. :-)
Cheers, in your own time Harrison, I've still got to design the pages for Ultimate Amiga and I'm in no rush to do that .
I've done some more reconsidering on this project and decided I am not going to totally rely on people scanning books, I'm going to purchase all of them myself for several reasons. If you look at the my project management page for "The Great Amiga Author Hunt" you will see I have got a few things I want to do with the books. Basically I need the books scanned at the highest possible resolution, something as silly as 2600dpi and scanned at 20 pages/minute, esspecially as there are nearly 200 books.

Originally Posted by Harrison:
A question I now have. I know some of these books are unofficially on other sites for download. We have been granted exclusive rights to host them, so I think we will need to protect this permission by either asking other sites to remove the books, or for them to redirect to our sites instead. I will chat with Zetr0 to ask him about this, as he knows his stuff regarding legal and copyright issues and laws.
This is a dilemma i was worrying about, as these other sites have provided the community a great service and in some way need to be respected. Considering this, a redirect to our sites is the best solution . That way they can list the books but for download, users go to an authorised site.

This is how I see it working:

Ultimate Amiga will be members only access, i.e. must sign in to download/read the books. Ultimate Amiga will provide two services, the download of books and the online reading of books. dbODF is the project I am working on to provide the online reading service.

Classic Amiga will provide the public facing side for downloads, no registration or logging in. Although I think there will need to be some sort of captcha/question system in place to stop leechers and unauthorised usage from non Amiga related sites and advertisement based / commercial sites. Basically protect your bandwith. Your thoughts on this?

CombinedWorks, I'll decide what services will be provided at a future date. I need to get the site up and running first and that will take a while.

And don't forget to pm your choice of books.
[Reply]
Harrison 22:08 2nd September 2012
Bandwidth isn't too much of an issue as the servers are on unlimited bandwidth with a dedicated 100Mbit line. But I agree that a system does need to be in place to stop off site file linking, or sites leaching content directly. I will have a think on the best way to do that... I don't want it to be too intrusive for users, just stop the off site connections directly to the files.
[Reply]
MadAngus 18:22 7th September 2012
Progress Update: Good and Bad News

The Good News
Jason Holborn author of 'Ultimate AMOS'
Just got a reply from Jason (Now Jason Brown, bardophotographic), and he has given permission for Amiga related sites to distribute his book, pending confirmation from future publishing on the copyright status of the book.

Restrictions on distribution: xAMOS and UltimateAmiga must remain non commercial, if this changes a license fee will be required. Also the book may not be distributed with any kind of commercial software or on commercial sites, a license fee will be required for any form of commercial distribution.

I'll contact Future Publishing to confirm the copyright Status and to request permission to distribute if the copyright remains with them.

The Bad News
Current status of other books in the search.

Stephen Hill author of 'Amiga Games Maker's Manual'
Status: I'm Going to give this one last attempt and then I'm closing the book on this one.
Conclusion: Unlikely

Dicon Peeke author of 'Writing role playing games for Amos'
Status: No Response
Conclusion: Permission Denied

Anne Tucker and Len Tucker authors of 'AMOS in Action: A Practical Guide to Mastering AMOS on the Amiga'
Status: Untraceable
Conclusion: Permission Denied

Peter J Hickman author of the "All About AMOS" Newsletters.
Status: Untraceable
Conclusion: Permission Denied


Changing this, got to much work todo to chase this book any further.
Stephen Hill author of 'Amiga Games Maker's Manual'
Status: No Response
Conclusion: Permission Denied
[Reply]
MadAngus 21:44 22nd September 2012
Harrison, is the wiki book list available in a delimited format, it would help my work if I could sort it by author or other category depending on purpose.
[Reply]
MadAngus 19:57 6th December 2012
Progress Update:

Permission Granted
With the help of Paul Townsend of AmigaOne Productions I was able to contact Anne Tucker and she has kindly allowed the AMOS in Action book to be part of this preservation project.
Anne Tucker and Len Tucker authors of 'AMOS in Action: A Practical Guide to Mastering AMOS on the Amiga'
Status: Found
Conclusion: Permission Granted

Status Update
Got a response from Future Publishing and although they cannot establish the copyright status of the following books/supplements they have no problem with distribution within this project if they are the publishers. I now need to track down the authors and get their permissions as well.



















[Reply]
Harrison 20:59 6th December 2012
Brilliant work. We should be able to start creating the actual reference library with a selection of books to get us started after the new year.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 2
[Reply]
Phantom 22:35 14th December 2012
You do really an impressive research mate. I'm really speechless.
[Reply]
morpa 23:07 4th September 2018
Kind of continued a part of this project, under my source code preservation project. I have a slightly angle though: I ask the authors if they can release their books under creative commons, which solves the problem with that the literature and permission is tied to a specific project or even person. When I get tired of this, or get hit by a car another person can just continue if they would like. That means I have contacted (again) almost every author madAngus did contact, and a few others too. So far I have been given permissions for a quite a few books, but a slightly different set than madAngus had as of yet I also try to contact every Amiga book author I can find, so this is not AMOS-only. I'm not trying to replace madAngus works, but he hasn't been logged in for 5 years plus, so I guess his got other interests now-a-days and really don't care.

My goals:
1) Get a general liberal permission for anyone, for as much Amiga literature I can, under Creative Commons or alike.
2) Host a pdf, in best cases one optimized and one higher res. for archival purposes
3) In best case, also host an online version of the book. This is done by ocr->asciidoc. Asciidoc can be convertehd to many formats, example from the Total Amiga Assembler book. I invite anyone interested in helping out with this.

Site and code repo etc: https://amigasourcepres.gitlab.io/page/books/amos/ Feel free to use, but notice books and scans will be updated, maybe moved etc, as it is all quite an early phase.
[Reply]
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