Color me curious about the new book Second Life: The Official Guide, written by a number of notable bloggers and developers in SL, including
Michael Rymaszewski, Wagner James Au, Mark Wallace, Catherine Winters, Cory Ondrejka, and Benjamin Batstone-Cunningham. While a dead trees static guide to a dynamic, constantly-in-beta virtual world sounds like a strange idea, I’m intrigued about what kinds of information is best imparted in book form.
For example, I have never really been able to get much more than a crude grasp of LSL (linden scripting language), which is really the magic behind the curtain of much of the cool stuff in SL. And I would love a plainly written tutorial to avimator, a program you can use to create custom animations for avatars. (Charleston, anyone?)
I think it’s only a matter of time before we get Second Life: The Un-official Guide, covering such topics as "Fun and Profit through Griefing," "cheating on your RL partner in SL," and "Copybot: Cool Hack or All Powerful Destroyer of Virtual Markets?".
I am equally perplexed at the idea of bringing out a guide in book form. Surely 50% of it will be out of date within the next two client/grid updates!