[Catalyst] So, what do we want in the -next- book?

[Ian Sillitoe]

IMO best tech books are the ones that manage to appeal to the widest range
of audiences: newbies, experienced coder who is just unfamiliar with topic,
hardcore hackers who will use it as a reference manual (e.g. Camel book).

If you want comments from across the spectrum I can give you my perspective
on getting the book - someone who was new to Catalyst (and DBIx) but have
been coding perl for a while (~10 yrs) and was looking to migrate a large
existing academic project to a more efficient framework (for ease of
development, faster web apps and more organised webservices).

First off, I liked the book and found it useful - if anyone hasn't got it,
they should. The following is intended as constructive comments for the 2nd
edition (in no particular order of importance):

I think the tutorial format of following a specific problem through by
adding more and more layers of complexity is obviously sound and useful.
However, one downside of this approach is that by framing your answers
against a specific problem (rather than providing more abstract examples or
perhaps a range of different applications/problems), it can be more
difficult to adjust the given examples to your specific problem. Essentially
there often seemed to be only one example per problem before moving on to
the next problem - which meant things went past pretty quickly. I would
suggest more examples/abstraction at each section.

DBIx - I appreciate Catalyst may not want to tie itself to one particular
Model, however a lot of the online docs assume you know a reasonable amount
about DBIx (certainly if you want to do anything more interesting than just
the CRUD tutorial). You could argue that it is such a big (and essentially
unrelated) topic you should just get a book on DBIx. Obviously you can find
all this stuff out by trawling through PODs and mailing lists, but one
reason I would buy a textbook is to have it all in one place - even just
including the DBIx FAQ in the appendix would be useful (I'm exaggerating,
but I'm sure you get my point).

I know that one of the big appeals of Catalyst is that it is so free-form
and powerful, however as a relatively competent coder, I was looking for a
bit more advice on Catalyst Best Practices (I'm a big fan of Damian Conway's
book). In terms of really simple, stupid stuff - yes there are hundreds of
ways of doing things but in our years of experience (mistakes) - this is a
good rule of thumb and this is why it is a good rule of thumb.

Having the FAQ section would also be handy for the same reason.

I would find the general API reference for the main Catalysts objects (and
discussion of "good" plugins) would also be very useful although I
understand that the danger would be that it gets outdated pretty quickly.

I also agree with the webservices comment - I would be very interested to
read discussion of synchronous and asynchronous webservices in
Catalyst/SOAP.

Cheers,

Ian


On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 4:11 PM, Matt S Trout <dbix-class at trout.me.uk> wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 09:25:07PM +0300, Alex Povolotsky wrote:
> > Matt S Trout wrote:
> > >Since a fair few of you will now have John's book, I figured it was
> time
> > >to ask what you'd want from a second book.
> > >
> > >I guess the existing one provides a pretty good tutorial style, so we
> > >should
> > >be looking at something more in-depth / intermediate to advanced.
> > >
> > >What do you guys think?
> > >
> > >
> > 1. Using bases with transactions and without auto-commit.
> > 2. Just simple link to nginx as a solution for memory/load balance
> problems
>
> I think any deployment section should touch on as many somewhat-common
> webservers as possible briefly, but there are many competitors in that
> space
> and I'm not interested in advocacy of a specific one.
>
> --
>      Matt S Trout       Need help with your Catalyst or DBIx::Class
> project?
>   Technical Director
> http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/catalyst/
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