On 15/02/2009, at 1:57 PM, Kevin Monceaux wrote:
Catalyst Fans,
On Fri, 13 Feb 2009, David Steiner wrote:
i added my comments to the article, suggesting that we step up on the
documentation and marketing! we need to give the layperson a easier
ride in
starting out with catalyst. and that requires more tutorials/
screencasts,
better official documentation, and more books being written. tell
me what you
people think of the article and how we can get catalyst more used
and known.
As a newbie I can certainly agree that all of the above suggestions
regarding documentation/books/tutorials/screencasts would be good
things. I have a couple of sites I'm considering switching to
Catalyst, one of which is currently Django based and still running
running version 0.97. I haven't really been keeping up with Django
lately and have hardly looked at the 1.x branch yet. I keep trying
to develop a fondness for Python, but it hasn't happened yet. But,
a recent Django documentation discovery has me considering trying
harder to love Python. A couple of days ago I discovered that with
the documentation sources included in the Django source tarball one
can generate documentation in a variety of formats, including pdf.
Projects with pdf documentation always score extra points with me.
It would be better if the pdf manual was available on the Django
site, but being able to generate it from sources is still a plus in
Django's favor. Even if viewing on screen, I like documentation
that at least looks like a book. And, I frequently print out bits
of documentation to read in bed. I generated the available pdf
Django docs and ended up with a 748 page manual!!! And, from a
quick search on Amazon it appears half a dozen up-to-date Django
books have come out in the last few months. I'm impressed with the
available Django docs.
Hmm,
quick and dirty but apparently it works: I'm doing it from an svk
checkout, but I suppose it would be even simpler if you did it in the
right bit of @INC:
find Catalyst-Runtime/5.80/trunk/lib/ Catalyst-Manual/5.70/trunk/lib/ -
name '*' > /tmp/files
# change the order of stuff in /tmp/files around here if you want.
for i in `cat /tmp/files`; do perldoc -T -u $i >> /tmp/catpod.pod ;
done;
cd /tmp/
pod2latex -full -out catpod.tex catpod.pod
pdflatex catpod.tex
and there you go, a pdf of all 363 pages of the catalyst docs.
(actually this is a similar process to what we're doing to make the
first drafts of the catalyst book (err with our own original material,
not the catalyst project pod). Unfortunately for us, the publisher's
workflow eventually requires that we use file format compatible with a
word processor we will not name™)
Oh if you want super brownie points, go and learn haskell, and provide
a pod translator for pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc). Or
even better an equivalent arbitrary-markup-language parser written in
perl.
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