Hi, Discussing with David and Romain, since we are somehow reaching maturity with the Liquidsoap language (yay 1.0 soon), we started to think about writing a book about it. The idea would be to have a progressive text that you could bring to the beach or in the metro to learn about Liquidsoap, far away from the distractions of the internet. Since you guys on this mailing-list are probably potential readers, we wanted to have your comments about the idea, especially on the points below. What do you think of it?
___1___ Do we need this? Since writing the book would mean a lot of work for us, we'd rather write it only if it will be read... Do you think that there is some demand for it? Would you read it? You might as well think that nobody reads book anymore and we'd better spend time on the online doc... I tend to think that both have distinct purposes (you look for the specific point on the web whereas you want a progressive explanation from A to Z in a book), but you might have a different point of view: how different should be the web doc and the book? ___2___ Which contents? What kind of contents would you like to see? Should we include an explanation of how to setup a basic radio toolchain (icecast, etc.) or should we keep space to go into the advanced programming features of the language? More generally, should we write "a book about setting up a radio with Liquidsoap" or a "book about Liquidsoap"? How detailed should we be about the language itself (the stream model, types, etc.)? What kind of advanced topics should we deal with (e.g. which LADSPA plugins to use, exporting metadata to JSON, using clocks, examples of external scripts for scheduling, etc.)? ___3___ Where should we publish it? We would rather go with a real publisher (O'Reilly for instance), but we could also go with self-publishing (e.g. www.lulu.com). What do you think of it? Do you have experience with a publisher that you would like to recommend to us? There are some criteria that could force us to choose a particular one: for instance, should we keep a web version available under a creative-commons-like license? ___4___ What source format? Which tool should we use to write the book? Coming from the academics, latex would seem a natural choice. However, there are other options that we should explore too (also the format might be imposed by the publisher). We have our custom wiki-like format to generate the web documentation. Should we try to use this so that it's more easily imported back in the web documentation? There are some formats designed for books (such as docbook), do you have experience with some of them? Or should we try to be more collaborative and use a wiki for books, which would enable you to comment and/or help (see http://www.djangobook.com/ for example)? Thanks for your comments ! We are eager to read what you think about all this... ++ Sam. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1 _______________________________________________ Savonet-users mailing list Savonet-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/savonet-users
