* On Fri, Dec 11 2009, Rene Schickbauer wrote: > OBut i have one critic to add anyway: There is ONE argument in this > discussion that is just stupid: "There are X books on the subject so > this way is better". A "books only" search for "Microsoft Frontpage" > on Amazon.com turned up 3088 results - surely you wont suggest i > prefer Frontpage over Catalyst/Maplat/CGI.pm?
Hmm, I think you missed the point I was trying to make. Let's imagine a hypothetical situation. You want to write a web app. You don't know how. Would you pick a framework with no documentation and no users, or would you pick one with extensive documentation and many users? Most people would pick the second, right? You don't want to learn to write web applications AND dissecting some random source code on the Internet AND fix the bugs in that code, right? This process is inevitable with any software, of course; but the more users a software package has, the less likely *you* are to run into a critical show-stopper bug immediately. And, if you have a few books to help you, you can spend your time on your application instead of making all the beginner mistakes. (I did this recently. I wanted to write an Android app. I didn't want to use plain Java. The decision came down to Clojure and Scala. I like Clojure better than Scala. But I Googled for each in the context of Android, and Scala turned up results that allowed me to immediately get started. I couldn't get Clojure working. Once I got a "Hello World" app working, I just bought a Scala book and started working out of that. I learned Scala pretty quickly, which left me with plenty of time to work on the Android part. If there were no Google results and no books, I would have just given up, because I am lazy. Clojure may be a better language than Scala... but since I couldn't get started, I may never know.) In the Perl community, Catalyst is the web framework that's the closest to the second scenario. You can go from zero to "something" pretty quickly. There are books that guide you through the process, and people are around all day (and night) in various forums (and forms?) to help you with your questions. To some people, this is better than Pure Technical Correctness. If you are one of those people, Catalyst is a pretty rational choice for starting a web application in Perl. Hopefully I made this point clear this time. "Number of books" has nothing to do with the suitability of a technology for a particular purpose. But if you are trying to learn some technology, having a book or two can greatly accelerate the process. Regards, Jonathan Rockway -- print just => another => perl => hacker => if $,=$"
