In article <21672.1289313...@chthon>, Tom Christiansen <tchr...@perl.com> wrote:
> That last one snuck past me because I always quickly avert my eyes from > such self-mentions. I'm *terribly* queasy about the least hint of what > could be perceived as pecunious self-promotion. If you weren't prolific, it would be a much easier situation. However, you have your row to hoe by not only writing a lot of the core docs, but most of the best selling books. I'd hate to bow to the anti-capitialists just because they want to pretend that humans don't need money to live, especially since any real money you might get wouldn't bring you close to minimum wages for all the free writing you've done. Not everyone will be happy, but the Perl books are just another way of us providing good information about Perl. The money might have been big 15 years ago, but I don't think any reasonable person. We've created Perl information for a variety of sources and channels so it's available in many forms to suit more tastes and preferences. > Yet I'm bothered because it seems somewhat unfair to readers to point them > only at Camel:16 when Cookbook:14-18 covers that material in much richer > detail. Ultimately it's your call, but I think the Cookbook references should be in there. You only need a sentence or two. My own policy is to point people to external references as long as the documentation isn't deferring to them. If the books enhance rather than replace what's in core, I consider that to be fair. We shouldn't liberally pepper the docs with every external reference that might apply, but in this case, it's topical and appropriate. I think it's particularly *unfair* to ignore any and all commercial interests in the docs, in some misguided effort to lead people to form a fake world where they don't see what is in common practice among actual developers. For instance, we don't ignore ActiveState or IndigoPerl, Windows, Mac OS X, many, many payware editors, the list of Perl books in perlfaq2 (and now perlbook), Github, and many other things. Ignoring these ignores a lot of the world of Perl. I'd hate to lose out on providing valuable information to many people because a few have a particular political bent that would lead them to believe you were only in it for the money.
