We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children.
~Cory Doctorow
When I first started writing this book, it was an exploration of a weird and wild database that is so weird and wild that someone who works for Polaris confessed that they didn’t fully understand it.
Funny that, because neither do I. But when you live somewhere for a while, you figure out the best way to do things. What’s the nearest grocery? Is that the good grocery? Maybe you want to go to a more distant one because the produce is better. You figure out ways to handle bills, the mail, running errands, and sometimes — you figure out an exit.
I mentioned on the IUG Discord that I might take these posts from the original Bricks Without Clay blog and weave them together into a book. Certainly not a paper book, no trees should die for the PolarisTransactions database. But an ePub or a PDF might not be a bad thing. That way some interested librarians could drop it on their eReaders or tablets and have a handy reference guide available to them when they’re trying to figure out what PolarisTransactions is and what it does. The idea appealed to me and others so, ya know, what the hell?
I went ahead and did that.
Below you’ll find links to Bricks Without Clay: Demystifying PolarisTransactions. I’m big on cross-platform access so you’ll find it as a PDF, an ePub, and in Mobi format for Kindle devices. I figure at least one of those formats should work on everything. For a time, this may be a bit of a living document as I make any corrections needed. I’ve edited it as best I can, but I’d be completely unsurprised by an errant typo. The thing that you need to know is that this book isn’t just what you’ve seen here on the blog, these ten posts that make up ten chapters in the book.
Because I added a prologue and an eleventh chapter. Nothing groundbreaking, just a new beginning and a new ending. Everything in the book is copyright under Creative Commons. You’re free to use it, copy it, share it, and send it to your friends. All I ask is you keep the attribution and don’t sell it, because I’m not selling it. They say knowledge should be free and, often, it isn’t. But this book is.
In the book, I encourage readers to check out the IUG Forums for more information and as a way to discover the IUG Discord and find answers to their questions.
I’m doing that here too. A book is a thing that’s written, read, and hopefully finished. The IUG Forums? Those continue onward and forward. There’s more to learn, certainly more for me to learn. But for you?
Have a book.
And thanks for reading my screed.
Downloads
Download Bricks Without Clay: Demystifying PolarisTransactions