The Pragmatic Programmers, publishers of exceptional software programming topics, have just added ePub and mobi formats as options for their books (they've already had PDF as an option for pre-release as well as released books).

http://media.pragprog.com/newsletters/2009-03-25.html

http://www.pragprog.com/frequently-asked-questions/ebooks

I've purchased books from them in the past, including "pre-release" books that they deliver as PDFs and have used Mobigen/mobicreator to convert the PDFs to prc's with limited success. The PDFs have complex formatting, as they're pretty much publication-ready proofs, so footnotes and images were all over the place, as was kerning and other layout goodness.

Downloading a few, their conversion is decent with footnotes and references linked, pictures sized appropriately. The table of contents isn't referenced correctly so the Kindle menu can't find it, but contents work to jump between chapters.

In all, a wonderful addition to our ebook life.

I also downloaded the ePub versions and they looked good in calibre's reader.

Welcome Dave & Andy and Pragprog!

H

These are DRM-free and "multi-format" (you get all three PDF, MOBI and ePub for one price). This is following O'Reilly's (http://oreilly.com/ebooks/) lead, but it is very welcome news.

This might be useful, as I need to start learning some programming.

Excellent. I have to re-download my books in Mobi and try them on my Kindle. I have three of them, the Textmate book and two Ruby on Rails books.

BOb

Based on your experience, it sounds like the Mobipocket files are generated using ePub as a source (you can skip between contents thanks to the NCX, but no inline-TOC referenced).

I'm glad to see this; wider acceptance is a good thing, and DRM free is obviously a huge boon.

Cool!

Has anyone purchased one? I'm looking to get one in epub, and I wanted to know how it would look compared to the pdf.

It sort of makes sense if they are going to offer ebook versions of programming references they are DRM free. I mean these books are targeted at the very people who already know how to remove the DRM and if not they will actually enjoy learning how.

Great to see these publishers sort of are thinking past more then the current quarterly reports.

One thing though, if you are a developer you already know that color or at least a 16-gray scale display is needed since many of our references use color to demark important portions of the text. Actually this can be said for almost all technical references or textbooks.