in reply to I'm back, sorta

Have you ever considered writing a book? I'd certainly be interested in an "Introduction to Computer Science for Perl Programmers" book, or a "Functional Programming and Perl", or even "Different Ways to Program Perl".

I actually think there are a lot of ad-hoc perl programmers who would like more formal knowledge of the subject.

(castaway says "/me­too".)

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Re: Re: I'm back, sorta
by tilly (Archbishop) on May 02, 2003 at 00:12 UTC
    I am not adverse to writing a book but I won't put out the tremendous amount of necessary energy unless I had something specific to write about that I don't feel anyone else covers well enough.

    Which makes a topic harder to come up with that you might think. For instance Dominus is writing the functional programming book, and there already is a good algorithms book...

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Re: Re: I'm back, sorta
by Anonymous Monk on May 01, 2003 at 23:40 UTC

    Aloha friend, a few comments:

    How would an intro to compsci be different for Perl programmers than any other programmer? For that matter, would it even be different enough from existing texts to warrant a separate book with a narrower target audience? With regards to functional programming, that is covered to some extent in every Perl book. You might also want to look at Computer Science and Perl Programming (slightly misleading title).

    As for Perl books (assuming you mean Perl 5), I think the market has been adequately saturated. There are a great deal of very high quality books on almost every Perl 5 topic around. I think most people would much rather see efforts be focused on Perl 6 and Parrot documentation.

    Also of consideration is the fact that writing books isn't for everyone. While you can learn a fair bit while writing a book, many people find it incredibly tedious work. You're mostly just translating what you already know into format that other's can learn easily from. Often you do not acquire much new technical knowledge in the process. This is why documentation for many open source projects lags behind. Don't let this discourage you though, sharing knowledge is an truly altruistic endeavour.

    Thanks for your time :)

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