Monthly Archives: March 2009

I've been wanting to read SICP for awhile, but with lots of other books on my to-read list, as well as the $50 dollar price tag for a used copy, I've put it on hold. The price, while relatively steep, usually doesn't stop me from picking up a highly-desired book, but I held off mainly as the book is freely available on their website, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license and this seems like a lot to pay for a free-as-in-beer book.

Since SICP runs close to 600 printed pages and approximately 40 HTML files , I'd rather not read it in my browser and printing it on the home printer is not really an option. I decided that using Lulu might be a workable solution.

Lulu takes PDFs so step one was to convert the SICP website to one big PDF.

First, I used wget to mirror the site. Now that I had all the files, I wanted to clean them up a little. Every single page had the previous and next links at the bottom and this was obviously not needed when the pages are in physical form. I ran the following sed command to remove these lines:

sed -i "/[Go to/d" *html

The next step was to convert the HTML to PDF. I used htmldoc for this particular task.  First, I put all the names of the HTML files in one text file, on one line, and in the correct order. I called this file “all_files.txt”. The htmldoc command I used to convert to PDF is the following:

htmldoc -f sicp.pdf --webpage --left .75in --right .75in cat all_files.txt

I then uploaded this file up to Lulu and designed my (very) simple cover. I made it clear on the back  cover text that I was printing this book under the rights granted by the aforementioned license and would receive no profit from this book with a link back to the original source. I'm not a lawyer so I hope that covers all bases.

Lulu has a convenient feature that will let you do a private printing. I could probably make  this book public, setting my profit to zero, and even though that would be covered under the license, it still feels strange to do.

I am very curious how this book will turn out. The Lulu process was actually fun and if this turns out well, I could see myself using the service again. Once I get the book, I'll post my reviews of the service and possibly some pictures of the final product. Nonetheless, I'm excited to get a print version of this book for a much-reduced price.

Edited to add:
Here's the download for the PDF: sicp.pdf

My last post was about a little Greasemonkey script that I wrote to keep my last.fm window open from accidental closings. I thought it would be cool if there was an extension that could handle this, so before building one, I browsed the  Firefox extensions for one.

I found one that did everything my little script did and so much more: Tab Mix Plus.

All you have to do with this extension is right click and select 'Protect this Tab' and 'Lock this Tab.'  The 'Protect' keeps you from closing the window, and the 'Lock' locks in the current URL, forcing links on that tab to open up in new tabs. Useful.