Over on Advogato, Skud has been discussing this for a week or so.

Basically, the publisher sent the original request out, blindly, to a number of Perl hackers a few weeks ago. The compensation was rather low, the editorial direction was not high, and the deadlines were insane -- not to mention the fact that lots of people in clpm don't really like getting unsolicited bulk e-mail of this sort.

Undaunted by an early string of rejections, the publisher continues to search for people to finish the book. (One might wonder if it were better to line up authors *before* making a deadline.)

This behavior doesn't exactly endear me to look favorably on the resulting book....