[Catalyst] catalyst book

[Matt Rosin]

Possibly companies that wish to give back to open source could
contribute to a professional documentation fund. In this case digital
publication will enable the money to be used most efficiently.

Such a project could have a project owner and other contributors,
including those who contribute text and others who provide brief notes
on their own cases. In there, someone who is an experienced editor.

I am right now on a business trip in Sweden learning a new piece of
industrial software, which is used by lots of big companies. Turns out
a lot of the knowledge is locked in people's heads and one result is
that much time is spent on seminars. Some is okay but having docs to
digest in advance could save time and money.

If a project is going to be rolled out across other offices then
writing docs early could save money later. I don't know if this is
applicable to Catalyst but possibly it is when training a development
team to get them up to speed more quickly.

Writing documentation can be a learning experience but it is critical
to have an expert provide the focus and approach. Perhaps that could
be outlined sparsely and have others flesh it out with supervision by
the expert.

$60K for a book sounds like a nice deal. I recently worked on
translating a book on FindBugs, a cool sourceforge project that finds
bugs in Java code (wish one existed for Perl!) for a commercial
publisher (ASCII) for the Japanese market, just editing it was a big
job.

I don't know if it would attract enough people but I would likely buy
digital books on Catalyst.

My two cents.

Matt R.