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

[Ian Sillitoe]

Ali - I take your point, but I disagree that authors shouldn't write text
books. I like reading good books offline and I appreciate that really good
books take a great deal of time and effort to write. I think it's completely
fair enough that authors of good text books should receive some financial
rewards for taking the time to put their years of experience onto paper so I
don't have to waste my time making the same mistakes. Depending on your job,
a text book costs the same as working for - say between half-hour or a few
hours - either way a good text book will save you way more time than this in
the long term.

I agree that the cost of textbooks can seem pretty high but that's down to
the publishers not the authors (and I presume low circulation of niche
literature). The free docs on CPAN have more than enough to get you up and
running even if you are new to Perl - I would say this is the minimum spec
of any given project and Catalyst more than meets that. Having said that,
I'm sure everyone would agree that there is definitely room for improvement
and that is a job for everyone - novices and hackers alike.

Cheers,

Ian


On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 7:42 AM, Ali M. <tclwarrior at gmail.com> wrote:

> I just want to suggest, since soon Catalyst will move to a new wiki,
> why not celebrate the opportunity, by improving the documentation.
>
> I was personally always ... mmm... not sure how to describe this ....
> always surprised/annoyed ...  that beside the documentation we always
> needed a book!
>
> For commercial software I always thought of its as a conspiracy with
> the book publishers to make us buy books, specially since many
> software companies are also book publisher (MS Press), and you can add
> to this the scheme of certification and courses and things like oracle
> university kinda like extortion.
>
> I was kinda saddened to see that this was kinda true for Perl, the
> Perl documentation large parts of it are from the Perl Programming
> book by Larry Wall and others, and the documentation also in many
> place suggest that you need the book for more details. Okay the Perl
> documentation is huge and I probably don't need more detail, plus the
> book also reference the manual, so in a way, they were built to
> complement each other .... anyway its strongly suggested you need the
> book!
>
> The web, blogs, wikis are a great way to publish knowledge, we really
> dont need more books, we more knowledge, more documented knowledge,
> more documentation.
>
> Books are just a way to make money, money makers, that is exploting
> the weakness in the online documentation.
>
> So please, don't be an extortionist, don't make a book ... write a
> wiki page in the new wiki!
> All we really need are more pages on wiki not a book!
>
> But if you insist on writing a book, make a free online version, if
> you have found Catalyst useless, this could be something you are doing
> for Catalyst, like returning a favor or something.
>
> :) Just my thoughts
>
> On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 6:11 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/
> >  Shadowcat Systems Ltd.  Want a managed development or deployment
> platform?
> > http://chainsawblues.vox.com/
> http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/servers/
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
>
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