Perl publishing and attracting new developers

[Peter Corlett]

On 18 Sep 2013, at 21:03, gvim <gvimrc at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 18/09/2013 18:48, Peter Corlett wrote:
>> 
>> Dancer and Mojolicious are lightweight, DBIx::Class only slightly less so, and are not separately enough material for a full-sized book. At best, you're talking a 100 page print-on-demand labour of love.
> I've come across no less than 3 Sinatra books so why should a Dancer book be considered lightweight?

Sinatra is a library used for constructing web frameworks. Oh, and look, I see Lincoln Stein's CGI.pm book right there on my shelf. Sure, it's an awful book, but I bet at least two of those Sinatra books are as well.

>> Mojolicious and Moose *have* such a book, and although I can't find the ISBN for the Moose book, Mojolicious's is http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/3848200953/improtripe-21.
> I don't think a book published purely in German is that relevant.

People who speak Mandarin, Hindi or Spanish no doubt have much the same opinion of books published purely in English.

[...]
> The "and Perl" makes all the difference. If I'm a new developer choosing a language and I see "RESTful APIs with Python/PHP/Ruby" and nothing from Perl it may influence my choice of language even if there is a chapter tucked away in a Catalyst book somewhere. Whether it's marketing or not, Ruby and Python are taking the initiative, as I see it, by producing plenty of books which combine the language with another technology. You may not like it but it seems to interest developers.

I didn't ask which books you would like to exist to sit unsold in bookshops on the off-chance they might influence other people's opinion. I asked which books you would buy with your own money.

As it happens, I own a copy of "REST in Practice". I fished it out of my "to read" pile and given it a quick skim. The handful of examples within are in C# and Java, but it's not called "RESTful APIs with C#/Java" for a reason: this is a book about REST itself and some of the common RESTful protocols, not a programming textbook.

That you apparently desire this book to also include a tutorial on the various Perl APIs so as to spoon-feed the exact answers says more about you and/or your opinion of other developers than the state of the Perl publishing market.