On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 3:14 AM, Steve Piercy <[email protected]> wrote: > Howdy, > > While at PyCon, an editor, Rachel Roumeliotis, from O'Reilly Media informed > @mcdonc that they would like to publish books about Pyramid. At this point > we don't have a lot of information about the potential arrangement or what > the books would cover.
This is interesting. I was involved with two Pylons books, the Definitive Guide and one which was never finished. I was a tech reviewer for the former and a stand-in author for the latter. In those cases, the book's outline and contract were set before I got involved. This sounds like a better opportunity to Pyramid, since the development team is larger and is being more fully engaged, and also because the framework is more solid and less likely to need to change. Most of Pylons' problems can be traced back to the original vision of wanting to be like Rails, with the same level of batteries and magic. That was how the future looked in 2005. The book dutifully expressed that vision, although Pylons was from the beginning more modular than Rails and the book also reflected that. The book started with the 0.9.5 vision and was updated to the 0.9.8 vision by the time it was published, but the 1.0 vision was already starting to supercede it, and then the Pyramid vision came soon after and totally changed the paradigm. (Or rather, it expressed what we had been trying to do in 2005, minus the magic and higher-level batteries.) Now Pyramid has been released for a few years, and I don't see any major structural changes coming. What changes do we need if we're the only framework that supports traversal, several template engines, hooks and includes and tweens? Especially as it was able to spawn Kotti, which is even more configurable every time you turn around? (Kotti is what I'm studying now and trying to make a site from and want to write some development documentation for.) I don't have time to participate in this book but I like the suggestions so far, both in content, IP boundary, and different publishing paradigms (O'Reilly and Leanpub). Yes, we need a book, or books. The documentation is a reference and has to explain all the built-in features, both common and esoteric. We have repeatedly failed to write beginners' docs. This is where a commercial author/publisher can step in and write something "for dummies", and explain things in a different way, and give different examples of full-sized programs, and head out into the add-on sphere beyond where the official docs can focus on. There's several books right there. So Steve Piercy, I wish you luck and hope it goes somewhere. And if other prospective authors are looking into it over different publishing paradigms, I encourage them to do so. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pylons-discuss" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pylons-discuss?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
