I doubt that would have helped. Being caught infringing on someone's copyright is embarrassing to say the least. Embarrassment and being given advice, no matter how well-meaning, will often not go down well. In fact, many people get extra annoyed when you're nice about this sort of thing.
I think Zed's initial approach was a close approximation of the best way to handle this. Although I probably would have left it at the original notice and then a mere "thanks for taking it down". (speaking as someone who has no emotional involvement in the situation, anyway. Who knows how I would have reacted to that level of abuse)
I disagree. Frankly many people don't understand copyright law. Ask average Joe on the street what is Fair Use and most people don't have a clue. The Ruby guy didn't seem to know he was violating Fair Use, if so he likely wouldn't have called "Learn Ruby the Hard Way", and probably would make it more difficult to find for people that read the Python version, especially the author himself.
And I think if you couple that with the Hacker ethos and the way code licenses in our space usually exist (BSD, Apache, MIT, GPL, etc...) taking copyright material, modifying, and redisting, with attribution is usually fair game. Now such a tradition doesn't exist in the book market, but again, I'm not sure if a lot of people know that.
Note, if the book he was writing was a parody of Zed's book, he may be protected by Fair Use law.
In any case, all this points to the fact that he made an innocent mistake. And what I've discovered is that people who make these types of mistakes, while embarrassed, usually are deferential, unless personally attacked ("only an idiot can do something so stupid").
That's a different ball game. Support people are often extremely nice when they aren't fixing something that they should be fixing (although in some cases it's not possible). Being nice doesn't address the fact that I just lost two years worth of data.
I think Zed's initial approach was a close approximation of the best way to handle this. Although I probably would have left it at the original notice and then a mere "thanks for taking it down". (speaking as someone who has no emotional involvement in the situation, anyway. Who knows how I would have reacted to that level of abuse)