Short links for URLs in the book

Problem: link rot

Fluent Python, Second Edition has more than 1000 links to external resources. Inevitably, some of those links will rot as time passes. But I can’t change the URLs in the print book…

Solution: indirection

I replaced almost all URLs in the book with shortened versions that go through the fpy.li site which I control. The site has an .htaccess file with temporary redirects.

When I find out a link is stale, I can thange the redirect in .htaccess to a new target, which may be a link to copy in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine o the link in the book is back in service through the updated redirect.

Help wanted

Please report broken links as bugs in the FPY.LI.htaccess file. Also, feel free to send pull requests with fixes to that file. When I accept a PR, I will redeploy it to fpy.li/.htaccess.

Details

Almost all URLs in the book are replaced with shortened versions like http://fpy.li/1-3—for chapter 1, link #3.

There are also custom short URLs like https://fpy.li/code which redirects to the example code repository. I used custom short URLs for URLs with 3 or more mentions, or links to PEPs.

Exceptions:

• URLs with oreilly in them are unchanged;
• fluentpython.com URL (with no path) is unchanged;

The FPY.LI.htaccess is deployed at the root folder in http://fpy.li.