dewaka

Since this is an introductory text, it covers things you probably already know about - four noble truths, eight fold path etc.

However, there are some practical advice which I found to be nicely explained,

- Book has a chapter on meditation and I think it does get to the point without fluff, for example. It talks about Samatha (such as focus on breath) and Vipassana meditation.

- Talks about some important sutras such as Kalama sutra which is all about how to live your life as a Buddhist as a layman (as opposed to a monk).

I can also recommend "What the Buddha Taught" by Walpola Rahula. It is from a Theravada perspective, but I think it is a good start to get to know the core of Buddhism based on the Pali cannon.

In Sri Lanka earliest writings (which were mostly religious) were preserved first in the mediums such as Palm leaves, and the alphabet clearly shows that influence. As the top comment points out, making sure that you do not damage the script was a pretty important concern, and rounded letters certainly helped. If one studies the evolution of Sinhalese (and Tamil) alphabet it can be clearly seen that things got curvier as the alphabet developed from earlier Brahmi scripts [1].

[1] http://www.akuru.org/developsinhla2.htm

Palm leaves were commonly used to write in Sinhalese as well, and the alphabet, similarly, is very curvy[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinhalese_alphabet

I moved to ConEmu: https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/ from Console2 at work. I find that to be even more feature rich than Terminator for Linux which I use at home.

Ubuntu with Arch in VirtualBox at home. Windows 7 at work.

Glad you liked it.