I too think this is a great idea (and I enjoyed tye's article as well). From what I've seen there are certainly more than enough good authors here who also have useful things to say (a great if often elusive combination). However, my first thought (bearing in mind that I'm a Professional Pessimist) is that such a book would have to be a miracle of organization and editing, otherwise you could just use Data::Dumper and publish the Monastery database for all the benefit it would give.

I'm just thinking that part of what makes Perl Monks great is the dynamic nature of it, the way it responds almost instantly to any input ... it's alive! How would you go about capturing this in a book? I certainly don't want to put anyone off from the project, and I'd certainly support it, but I think it is not going to be easy.

Ok Albannach, how about a suggestion rather than just slag then? Ok, the first thing that comes to mind would be subdivisions on the basis of general task domain, as well as level of expertise. It would be great to be able to publish the range of answers that appear here, all perfectly good and all for the same question, but requiring sometimes vastly different levels of understanding.

Update Hmm... japhy's response took a very different route, and I really like that too, but perhaps that would apply more to a Monastery document than something that could be published in the commercial press?