On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 6:20 PM, Grant Rettke <gret...@acm.org> wrote: > Writing books is hard from what I hear.
Indeed. > Lot of Racketeers individually want to do it. > > Perhaps there is an opportunity for collaboration? We'll see. I've set out my stall, more or less. There is a reasonably detailed plan and the intro chapter more or less says what I want to do. My views have changed slightly since I wrote that. I believe a brief introductory chapter or three is necessary, and I see the remaining project focused chapters as optional. > The Real World Haskell book was pretty interesting: > 1. Developed as a wiki. > 2. Determined the amount of the book that was peer-reviewed via the wiki > itself. > 3. Released in print and online. My understanding is that it was written by 3 ppl with feedback (but not content) from "the community". My experience with the Scheme Cookbook is that a few dedicated ppl are more productive than the crowd sourcing approach. The crowd will read and fix errors but not generate large amounts of original content. Had I the time, I would write a detailed TOC, then measure what people click through to read, and then write the book that people actually want. With self publishing this could be reasonably worthwhile. I estimate a lower bound on sales at 500 copies, and an upper bound at 5000 (based on some research I can't find right now). Cheers, N. _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users
