Perl publishing and attracting new developers

[Abigail]

On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 04:19:18PM +0100, gvim wrote:
> On 18/09/2013 15:57, Jason Clifford wrote:
>>
>> I wonder whether part of the answer to this question lies in the fact
>> that the things that could be covered in Perl books about frameworks,
>> Moose, etc are fairly well documented and that the documentation is
>> easily available.
>
> Ruby and Rails are well documented:
>
> http://ruby-doc.org/
> http://rubyonrails.org/documentation
>
> ... but the books sell very well.
>
>> All of this is not to say there are no new books. There is a new edition
>> of Mastering Perl on the way.
>>
>
> Considering the last edition was published in 2007 I would rather have  
> seen a new Perl Cookbook, Object-Oriented Perl or, better still, some  
> new titles on specific applications of Perl, eg. Perl for Android (ok,  
> ok but you get my drift), Perl REST APIs or Web Development with  
> Dancer/Mojolicious.


I'd call them niche books. If generic books don't sell, why would
niche books?

What type of books about other languages sell well? Is it the more
generic books, or limited subject books you're proposing?


If I look at my two shelves of Perl books, there's only one Perl book
I've actually used when programming, and that's the Perl/Tk book (but
the last time was probably 10 years ago). And then mostly because I
didn't go along with the Perl/Tk manual pages.

The other books I've used to do Perl programming don't contain a shred
of Perl, and the authors may be completely unaware of existance of a
language called Perl. Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment has,
for me, always been the best book to help my Perl programming.




Abigail