I'd really like to see a project to gather up, modernize and peer review all the best / informative Advent articles of years past, and we could gather it together as an open source project on github (similarly to the way the Modern Perl book is done). Crafting an ebook would be straightforward, even if we didn't have a publisher. We could version it and update it from time to time as well.
We could even put it on some various ebook sites and charge a small fee, to try and raise some money for the project. I can even see the steps here: 1) We'd need a poll to rate all the existing advent articles (I'd probably consider Octavian's as one article for the purposes of this) 2) We'd choose the top XX% 3) We move those to github and edit them to bring them up to modern specs 4) We have a panel of experts review the articles for best practices, etc. 5) We'd need an editorial intro and at least some sort of basic website (could even be github pages) 6) We could then publish them as an ebook and lots of people would blog / tweet / etc to help get notice. 7) We'd get some of the various reasonable popular Perl websites to link to it The question is do we have people that can step up to this? Octavian points out that we are not really seeing a lot of community activity here and am not sure the core reasons. Last summer's poll suggested the number one reason people have trouble contributing is that they don't know what to do. However I suspect there's a little more to it, perhaps something related to how contributing tends to be a 'in my spare time only, when I have nothing else cooking' thing. Currently there's no "Catalyst Foundation" helping to drive the project along, we just have a collection of people contributing when they can in a somewhat uncoordinated way. On the other hand, there's a lot of people hanging out on IRC, and it seems a lot of companies using Catalyst. My thought lately is that if we tried reaching out directly to companies perhaps we could make community contribution part of some people's job spec... Thoughts on the above? Last time I tried emailing CTO's of companies using Perl I got hate mail from programmers asking me not to bring the fact that the company was 'still using Perl' to the attention o management... :) John >________________________________ > From: Octavian Rasnita <orasn...@gmail.com> >To: John Karr <brain...@brainbuz.org>; 'The elegant MVC web framework' ><catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk> >Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2012 4:12 AM >Subject: [Catalyst] Re: Advent 2012 -- Catalyst in Nine Steps -- Kudos to >Octavian > >From: "John Karr" <brain...@brainbuz.org> > >> I was just looking at Octavian Rasnita's 9 part contribution to the Advent >> Calendar. >> >> This is exactly what I needed when I was learning Catalyst, and would have >> made it a lot easier. >> >> I would love to see this approach carried out to a larger book for beginners >> and this article added to the main Catalyst Documentation area on CPAN. >> > > >Thank you John. I'm glad you found my approach useful. It is a slower way to >teach something step by step, but I like that way because it doesn't assume >that some things are known beforehand, but they are explained step by step. >Yes, I am thinking to write a Catalyst book for beginners, but for the moment >is just an idea. >(We all know that Catalyst is the most used Perl web framework, but I don't >know for sure how much interest still is in Catalyst these days. I am thinking >to how many days remained without articles in Catalyst advent last year, and >this year also...) > >A book that shows how to use Catalyst as we use it these days should also >explain at least a little other modules like Moose, DBIC, Template-Toolkit, >FormFu, Plack, because there are no books for them, (but only for >Template-Toolkit), and without knowing those modules, it will appear that >Catalyst is very hard to understand. All of them have good POD documentation, >but Catalyst also has POD documentation, however that documentation is mostly >a kind of reference, but a book is usually prefered by a beginner, because it >doesn't just tell how to do the things, but it also tell why to do it that way >and not in a different way. > >I have sent the articles for the Catalyst advent in POD format, and if they >are considered good enough, I would be glad if they will be added in the CPAN >Catalyst documentation. > >Octavian > > >_______________________________________________ >List: Catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk >Listinfo: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/catalyst >Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk/ >Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/ > > > _______________________________________________ List: Catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk Listinfo: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
