[Catalyst] Catalyst Framework: Up and Running?

[TCB]

I corresponded briefly with a few cat big shots about this a while back. The
short answer is that there seemed to be more utility in improving the current
online doco than in working on a dead tree book. If cat gets to a point where
O'Reilly or someone else decides it's worth coming to us for a paper book that's
probably the time to start talking about it. 

The longer answer, and here we enter my opinion and not any consensus or opinion
from others, is that books are remarkably difficult things to write. I've
published two Peach Pit books and wrote for a living for a couple of years. A cat
book, in my opinion, would be an even trickier affair than most books because it
would have to find some kind of focus for a market segment. The beauty of Ruby is
that it can be used by people who almost don't program, a good web designer with
comparatively minimal training can write a rails app. Most Ruby books I've seen
target that market, on the assumption that's where the money is for Ruby books.
Since there are a lot of Ruby books, I further assume at least some of them are
making money. So, is a cat book trying to get that same person using the
framework? Is it pitched at experienced perl programmers who want to write web
apps? Is it for .NET programmers who want to move to a LAMP stack instead of
MSoft? Right there we already have three very differnt books, and if you think a
bit you'll have half a dozen in no time at all. 

Personally I would be happy to write at least one of these, simply becasue I like
writing and I've done it before, so it would be a way for me to help out with MST
& Co do the heavy lifting. I'm simply not a good enough perl programmer to do
that yet. I will be, I hope, in the not terribly distant future. If I were to
write such a thing it would be available in plain text and html and I would keep
the copyright and grant unlimited verbatim redistribution with attribution. 

But that's just me. If anyone wants to take on any such a project I can probably
add some value helping with an outline, creating a style guide, proofreading
copy, etc and so forth. But be warned, it takes a special type to write a book
without a deadline, an advance check, and a cranky editor looking to get the
thing on shelves.  

TCB

On Tue Oct 17  8:33 , David Lloyd <lloy0076 at adam.com.au> sent:

>
>Hmmm...
>
>
>It seems that I have some time on my hands given that I was recently 
>"retrenched" (1) from my previous work. This meant that instead of 
>drumming up extra business, I decided to go into my local Borders 
>Bookstore and stumbled across O'Reilly's "Ruby on Rails: Up and Running" 
>little book.
>
>Having glanced quickly through it (well, read half of it in depth - I'm 
>a fast reader and it's a small book with lots of examples which I 
>skimmed over), it struck me that:
>
>"If O'Reilly would publish such a book, they might publish such a book 
>about the Catalyst Framework..."
>
>I am wondering if there'd be support for such a project, if:
>
>  - the source to the book were to be released under an open source
>    license (providing a publisher who could accept that could be found,
>    and given that O'Reilly have one or two books in their stable that
>    are they may be amenable to such an idea)
>
>  - the Catalyst community - were I to, ummm, coordinate? its writing -
>    could cope with my questions, do reviews of bits and pieces, make
>    suggestions and generally vastly improve what I had written
>
> From what I can tell there isn't such a project already in existence, 
>at least not obviously from http://www.catalystframework.org/...
>
>
>DSL
>
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