The Firebird Project has an integral user documentation project, a team of volunteers who are writing, editing and adapting user manuals, white papers and HowTos. At the time of this release, the hard-working coordinator of the Docs project is Paul Vinkenoog.

An index of available documents can be found in the on-line documentation index. Published docs currently include the essential Quick Start Guides for Firebird versions 1.5 and 2.0 in English and several other languages.

For the official documentation we use a Docbook XML format for sources and build PDF and HTML output using a suite of Java utilities customised for our purposes. These notes were developed and built under this system.

Paul Vinkenoog has written comprehensive, easy-to-follow manuals for writing Firebird documentation and for using our tools. You can find links to these manuals in the aforementioned index. New team members who want to do some writing or translating are always more than welcome. For information about the team's activities and progress you can visit the Docs Project's homepage. We have a lab forum for documenters and translators, firebird-docs, which you can join by visiting the Lists and Newsgroups page at the Firebird web site.

These release notes are your main documentation for Firebird 2. However, if you are unfamiliar with previous Firebird versions, you will also need the release notes for Firebird 1.5.3. For convenience, copies of both sets of release notes are included in the binary kits. They will be installed in the /doc directory beneath the Firebird root directory. Several other useful README documents are also installed there.

For future reference, if you ever need to get a copy of the latest release notes before beginning installation, you can download them from the Firebird web site. The link can be found on the same page that linked you to the binary kits, towards the bottom of the page.

If you do not own a copy of The Firebird Book, by Helen Borrie, then you will also need to find the beta documentation for InterBase® 6.0. It consists of several volumes in PDF format, of which the most useful will be the Language Reference (LangRef.pdf) and the Data Definition Guide (DataDef.pdf). The Firebird Project is not allowed to distribute these documents but they are easily found at several download sites on the Web using Google and the search key "LangRef.pdf". When you find one, you usually find them all!

--The Firebird Project