Let's see how this goes... The Game Dev School's "Game Dev Sourcebook" (name still being scrutinized) is my first attempt at a community-driven "book" resource using this fancy CMS system at www.GameDevSchool.com. Consider this an experiment on some level, but it will solidify into a regular segment of the site once I'm sure I have it all set up proper-like. I'm struggling with categories right now, but I'm always a fan of throwing something new in front of people to see how they react...

What is it? I'm glad you asked. A "book" -- in the terms of this site's system [www.drupal.org] -- should work roughly like a wiki, in that members of the community (gamedevschool.com in this case) can add "pages" to the book and/or simply add comments to a given page to extend the given topic. What this can lead to is a very useful tome that isn't reliant solely on a single author. If people take it seriously, the community can police the book themselves to assure accuracy and a more thorough representation of said topics. Of course, it can get messy so we'll be carefully moderating the thing as well. Please write well (you should have paid attention in school during English classes... writing IS very important in the game industry!) and the community can benefit from your contributions. Of course you'll have to sign up for a site account to write anything, but don't worry about spam and such. I won't email you very often and I certainly won't be selling addies off.

Now that we covered "books" as this site sees them, you might hopefully understand what the Game Dev School Sourcebook can be if we put our minds to it. The topics covered could be nearly anything, but I'm thinking about everything from book/resource listings to actual sample code for solving particular problems. Book reviews, middleware listings, website links and more all seem possible to me. I'll get you all started with the occasional new page and maybe you will get inspired to add something of your own as we go. If you see some obvious errors in my thinking about all this, please let me know ASAP so I can fix it! I'm just testing this out, after all. This is the best time to work out the kinks!

Enjoy and I sincerely hope we can put together a great resource here. If you have ideas about how to alter/improve the 'book, look for a section in the book itself for suggestions. I figure putting that info in context will be appropriate. Of course, you can use the "contact us" form if you want instead.

Okay, I'll shut it and get back to writing another page or two. Wheee! :P

(sheesh.. I hope this doesn't turn out to be a major pain!)