Security isn't a topic that's e-commerce specific - and the fact that an e-commerce site needs to address security isn't something that's only important for e-commerce sites using Perl.

If you think that books about CGI shouldn't mention CGI in the title, than perhaps books about gaming shouldn't mention games, and books about e-commerce shouldn't mention e-commerce. Hey, that's it! Perhaps the book "CGI Programming with Perl" is actually about e-commerce, but they didn't want to mention e-commerce because someone convinced them that that wasn't cool.

Abigail

Tell me, what's so specific about e-commerce with Perl?

It's a field in which people are widely using Perl. Why not have a book on it? For just a second, let us Perl programmers think like business men.

it's problems and solutions are language independent.

Perl has many features that solve common problems in e-commerce, as do other languages. But I prefer Perl, so why not hype it?

Security isn't a topic that's e-commerce specific - and the fact that an e-commerce site needs to address security isn't something that's only important for e-commerce sites using Perl.

If I ran a major online business that uses Apache and mod_perl, I would certainly want to know what Perl can do for me security wise. I would be interested in other things as well (like the reliability and speed of Perl), but security would be a concern. Just look at all the bugs that people have recently found in PHP.

For just a second, let us Perl programmers think like business men.

No thanks. I mean, you can do that if you want, but I'm not.

Maybe the real issue you're running into is Perl culture. As a rule, Perl culture values two things: work, and play -- i.e., getting stuff done, and having fun. Things that are at odds with both of those two values (i.e., activities that neither get anything useful done nor are fun) are *widely* valued in the business community (Yay, more meetings!), but Perl culture tends to reject such thinking. A book devoted to e-commerce with Perl wouldn't sell, because Perl programmers wouldn't consider it any more useful (for getting things done, such as e-commerce work) than any *other* mod_perl book (no, the problem domain for ecommerce is *not* specially atypical), and a book on ecommerce frankly sounds like about as much fun as a root canal. Neither particularly useful nor much fun means most Perl programmers won't buy it.

Perl programmers are the people who buy the most Perl books, so if they're not going to buy it, it's gonna flop, unless it's part of an extant highly-successful series (e.g., Perl for Dummies probably sells pretty well to people with no prior Perl experience because it's riding on the success of prior books starting with DOS for Dummies).

You also seem to want very specific books to exist, rather than more all-encompassing books that cover the fundamentals

Yes, it seems that Perl books cover a lot fundamentals, which is a good thing, but I would also like to see books aimed at more specific areas. Perl works extremely well with databases, but how many books on Perl and databases are out there? Probably less than 10 (but most of the time you will only find 1 or 2 at a bookstore). On the other hand, a simple search on Amazon shows that there are close 80 books dealing with Java and databases alone. Yes, 80

Quite frankly, I am surprised by these numbers, which give me the feeling that it is difficult to get a Perl book published right now (okay, at least, harder than trying to get a Java book to print). What are the implications of these numbers? They are not good for Perl. I wish I had a solution. I guess I would like to walk into one of these bookstores and see bookshelves stockpiled with Perl books on all sorts of subjects and the magazine stand filled with TPJ, but that ain't happening any time soon.