Reddit mentions of Dead or Alive - the Choice Is Yours: The Definitive Self Protection Handbook

I'm at a Gracie Barra, meaning that there are lots of classes based off the fundamentals curriculum, which includes self defence. Personally I'd be perfectly happy if there was no self-defence taught at all, because I find it very dull to train. That's because self defence training tends to be taught purely through compliant drilling, which I find neither interesting nor useful.

Having said that, I know some academies make it more practical, by integrating their self defence curriculum with regular sparring (e.g., have someone throw on a pair of gloves etc, which they do at certain Pedro Carvalho schools, among others). I'm not sure how that would work with unarmed defence against knives and guns, which I have to admit I always find a bit dubious. But to each their own.

Also, for self defence I would have thought the actual technique is just a small part, so you would in addition need to learn things like dealing with adrenaline, different environments, legal ramifications, verbal posturing etc, which I have never seen even mentioned by BJJ schools, whether or not they claim they teach self defence (though admittedly I haven't looked all that hard). Geoff Thompson is probably a good place to go for that kind of thing (at least the early stuff: he's veered off into new agey self help in the last few years).

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It is interesting that the self defence angle is often more prevalent in academies that trace back to Helio (like Pedro Sauer, Relson, the Valente brothers, Mansur etc). I'm assuming that the man who taught Helio, his elder brother Carlos, also valued self defence, yet you don't normally hear people say things like "jiu jitsu the way Carlos intended," or indeed any of the other three remaining brothers, Oswaldo, Gastao Jr and George.

Then again, could just be because Rorion and the Gracie Academy's marketing has been so effective, especially since Gracie Combatives started being pushed in 2009.