Re: [Catalyst] O’Reilly might yet be interested after all

[Daniel McBrearty]

it would be great.

I agree, not just DBIx but also TT. The great thing about cat is it's
flexibility. But as a beginner it can also be the worst thing. The
teaching style needs to be something like "look, it's modular, you can
bolt just about anything you want to onto this once you understand how
that works, but in the beginning, this is a good starting setup, which
most people use at least for a while ... "

cheers


On 2/6/07, A. Pagaltzis <pagaltzis at gmx.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I just had the following exchange on reddit:
>
> * a-p <http://programming.reddit.com/info/12u8e/comments/c12vm0>:
> > There's a book in the making. Unfortunately, O'Reilly won't be
> > the one publishing it. When the Catalyst devs approached them
> > about a book, O'Reilly basically stated that they want only a
> > single web framework in their lineup, and they've settled on
> > Rails, and that's that. Short-sighted if you ask me (and I'm
> > not just saying that because of Catalyst, there's also Django),
> > but there ya go.
>
> To which Tim O'Reilly replied:
>
> * timoreilly <http://programming.reddit.com/info/12u8e/comments/c131n8>:
> > I don't know who was supposed to have made that statement, but
> > it doesn't make any sense to me. I'll look into it.
> >
> > That being said, I can imagine that an editor might have said
> > that he or she thought that Rails had the ruby framework market
> > wrapped up for now, and that there wasn't room for a book on
> > another framework till said framework had proved to have strong
> > adoption. That's a potentially legitimate market assessment –
> > the computer book market is pretty brutal these days, and
> > topics that once would have made for a successful book now
> > don't sell enough copies to recover their costs – but even
> > then, that would be a "for now."
> >
> > A lot of publishers still throw stuff at the wall to see what
> > sticks. We tend to publish books that we believe will succeed.
> > And often, that means waiting till a new tool or framework has
> > stood the test of time, and is at the right place on the
> > adoption curve. It doesn't do anyone – the author, readers,
> > bookstores, or the publisher – to publish a book that doesn't
> > sell. Bookstores will give it a few months, and if it doesn't
> > do well, it will be returned, and that's the end of that.
> > Waiting a bit longer may actually increase your chances of
> > success. It's a bit like surfing. Paddling too early is as bad
> > as paddling too late – you have to catch the wave.
> >
> > O'Reilly has a history of publishing books before anyone else
> > – we published the first commercial book on the internet,
> > published about Perl in 1991, Linux in 1993 – but these
> > technologies were actually not new when we published about
> > them. They had proven themselves. They were just under the
> > radar of other publishers.
> >
> > As to publishing too early, Ruby itself is a good example. We
> > published our first Ruby books way too early, they flopped, and
> > then we took our eye off the ball.
>
> Sounds good to me. I think where Perl is concerned, Catalyst has
> definitely shown to be sticky, and it seems to me that it's also
> stable enough at this point that a book about it has hope of
> being useful. (Book publishing is a slow process, and if the
> thing's still evolving rapidly, the book will be obsolete by the
> time it's on the shelves. Actually, I think a book about Catalyst
> would have to be a book about DBIx::Class as well, partially
> anyway, and that too is now at the point of having stabilised
> enough.) Time is right, I think; the strong response to the
> advent calendar is probably a good gauge for that.
>
> Regards,
> --
> Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
>
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>


-- 
Daniel McBrearty
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