On Wed, 21 Sep 2011 05:46:50 -0400, Samuel Mimram <smim...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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? I would think not due to the fairly rapid ongoing development of LS. The printed book would tend to be obsolete upon publication. The online docmentation, forums, and IIRC are the best sources for info. Btw, the online docs are excellent - among the very best I've ever encountered. However, that being said, if you wished to enhance public visibility and public awareness of LS, then it would be a *good idea*. > > ___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.)? As complete as possible - the more, the thicker the better! > > ___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? O'Reilly - high visibility, trusted brand name, instant public acceptance. Good promotion. > > ___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 -- Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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