On Fri, 30 Mar 2001, Gunther Birznieks wrote:
> At 06:44 PM 3/29/01 +0800, Stas Bekman wrote:
> > > Indeed, I've often wished O'Reilly would provide book sources for people
> > > that have bought the treebook. Manning has something like that, you can buy
> > > the ebook cheaper than the actual book, and then if you decide to buy the
> > > treebook it's that much cheaper.
> >
> >I agree. Meanwhile you can always get the source by helping others to
> >review books :)
> >
> > > /me goes off to read a certain book which he'd promised to review but
> > > hasn't quite finished...
> >
> >make sure to grab the latest version of the sources though, we have done
> >lots of small patches in the last days...
> >
> >I wish others who have promised to help to review the book were actually
> >helping us :( We gotta release it asap, but the book was hardly touched by
> >reviewers... I guess we will just release it as it is... don't be
> >surprised if there will be some glitches in it... what can we do...
>
> You shouldn't worry so much. Considering that the mod_perl guide was an
> open source effort in the first place, I suspect the book will have already
> been quite well reviewed even if you've added a lot.
I do worry about it. The guide was many time considered as having the
ultimately correct information, and some of the broken stuff has been
revealed years after it was placed there. People were taking things for
granted, instead of getting the information scrutinuzed.
Definitely the information there had been corrected many times, but it has
too much information for me to feel calm that most of it correct.
> Our first book 7 years ago has a really stupid Y2K bug (stupid because the
> code says it takes Y2K into account and then goes on to not...) and oh
> yeah, some race condition in some of the file-based locking code...and ...
> we didnt use taint mode... and... files were opened without explicit > and
> < operators...and....
>
> In the end though, for the audience of our book, we had gotten much more
> praise than flames. The important thing was that we released something to
> enable people to start coding web apps that were very highly documented
> relative to other free web apps written in Perl. And regardless of the
> quality -- still *at the time*, higher quality than many other free web
> apps. So in the end, I think we would have done a disservice by vetting the
> book more technically and waiting another year than the way we did it --
> just release it.
You see, for us, there is no such a thing as "good enough". We are open
source people and compared to commercial bodies who are willing to
releases unfinished products because there are just good enough and better
than their competitors, we don't accept that. We want to code and
documentation be perfect, and we aren't ready to release the final version
of it claiming it to be a final version before it's perfect.
That's why the mod_perl guide and other online documentation projects are
great. Because it has never been claimed to be perfect, it's going
through the constant change. And one should never consider it to be
ultimately correct. It's in the constant beta version.
Things are very different with deadtree versions of the documentation.
It's parallel to a product release. Books are considered to be perfect,
and at least expected to be. Personally I hate to find broken or
misleading information in the books that I read, because I tend to trust
that the book has been scrutinized before it has been published. And if I
find errors from the very beginning I usually don't continue reading the
book at all, since I don't want to be misleaded. (Of course I'm talking
about books I try to learn something new from. If I read a book which
talks about stuff familiar to me, I usually submit corrections to the
author/publisher)
If we get to the point where we mistrust the printed information, that
will be very bad. And latest rush of the many publishers to print early
and often is a very bad trend, since the quality of the books gets very
very bad. (This is very different from the open source motto of releasing
early and often, since those releases aren't considered stable/perfect).
Luckily ORA books are still keeping a high profile. I hope they stay that
way.
Of course there is an issue of constant evolvement of the sw products
which makes the books outdated, even before their get to the book
shelves, therefore I believe that the feature is in the e-books, but we
aren't there yet for various reasons.
Finally, our book went through a major rewrite of the guide, and while you
might still not notice a difference from the guide in many place, it's
because I've placed those changes back into the guide. So the recent
versions of the guide have lots of information which is new and never has
been reviewed.
That's why we need many eyes, of both experienced and non-experienced
programmers and users to make all the bugs in the book shallow. So when
the book gets published it will bring more people into mod_perl community
and not do the opposite.
You clearly understand that the book isn't going to make Eric, me and ORA
somewhat richer, because the target audience is too small, hence the sales
vollume will be hardly sufficient for ORA to get even, not talking about
revenues one grabs when writing a pure Perl book with ORA :) And still ORA
publishes books that improves their image, even if doesn't fill their
pockets (which indirectly fills their pockets :) When I'm thinking about
the number of hours we have spent on the book so far, we could be much
more richer indeed if we just did some coding for some company, but it's
all about open source and pleasure and not money.
Remember that if you enjoy creating and using open source products, you
need to help. Because if you don't, the sharks with corporate money will
take over and you'd have less and less chances to find a working place
which uses open source, not talking about releasing open source products.
Documentation is one of the important aspects of making open source a
viable solution for the commercial world, and hence it's as important to
make it great as it's important to write a great code.
To conclude my rambling, take a look at the eagle book. Kudos to Doug,
Lincoln and many reviewers who made this book very clean of errors. I
consider it as a really great work done by the authors and the caring
community. If we get out our book of a similar or better quality we will
be very satisfied people.
> Well, I have a 30 hour flight coming up soon... perhaps I should download
> the sources. Then at ApacheCon we can all give you are reviews from our
> long flights. :)
That would help :) It's just that you might need to pay for the extra
weight :) (it's 800pp now).
_____________________________________________________________________
Stas Bekman JAm_pH -- Just Another mod_perl Hacker
http://stason.org/ mod_perl Guide http://perl.apache.org/guide
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://apachetoday.com http://logilune.com/
http://singlesheaven.com http://perl.apache.org http://perlmonth.com/
