Perl publishing and attracting new developers

[Avleen Vig]

On Sep 19, 2013 2:39 PM, "Peter Corlett" <abuse at cabal.org.uk> wrote:
>
> 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.

Well hold on just a minute there. One of the primary reasons Perl got to be
hugely popular is exactly because books like Programming Perl and Learning
Perl spoonfed the answers to new users. If the science of learning has
taught us anything, it's that spoonfeeding answers in a constructive
learning environment works very well.

It isn't for seasoned programmers who are comfortable with just reading api
docs, but my understanding of this thread is that we're talking about more
junior programmers who would benefit from learning in a more spoonfed way.
There's nothing wrong with that.