This would be work great as a university course. New grads usually don't know a lot about designing and building a production system and this can certainly be a lot of help.
There are a few courses doing that. I offered one that had student teams present a chapter each; Ric Holt at Waterloo was also doing something similar with reports. You can read a bit more about it on my blog [1].
I have been reading through this book, as each chapter is separate to all the others. It is, overall, a quality work, but some chapters definitely stand above others. On the downside, there is little cohesion between the chapters and, while some themes run throughout the course of the book, do not expect some clear takeaway at the end.
I am only about a quarter of the way through the book, but thus far I would have to say the chapters on BerkeleyDB and Eclipse were the most interesting, both containing a lot of history and insight into how the projects changed over time. The chapters on Audacity, Bash, and CMake were all pretty good, but I did not find them as enlightening.
I guess that means, thus far, the book is about a third of each: very interesting, modestly interesting, and mediocre. Not too bad considering each chapter is written by different individuals.
If I could buy the epubs without registration and for the price of the "price - amnesty donation", I would do so in a blink.
edit: Reading bit more about the project, all royalties go to Amnesty. Nice! Guess I could try finding epubs online "somewhere" and donating to Amnesty directly instead.
I was one of the editors for POSA but had to drop out because of other time commitments and family obligations. I'm really stoked for this to come out! The chapters that I had seen and reviewed looked awesome!
A little bit Off Topic : Are there any upcomming or new open source projects that chose C as the language of choice for implementation? (Just like some projects of old git, openMPI etc)
Edit: GitHub actually has a good list of trending repositories that you can filter by language. Most C projects seem to be libraries, but you might be able to glean something interesting - https://github.com/trending?l=c&since=monthly
I definitely think they should add one for ROS(RobotOS) and Gazebo(simulation framework). They are starting to build communities in industry and academia with some of the smartest people you can find.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2904425 (14 comments)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598643 (LLVM: 29 comments)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4211480 (Nginx: 29 comments)