Perl publishing and attracting new developers

[James Laver]

On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 4:19 PM, Adrian Howard <adrianh at quietstars.com> wrote:
>
> Publishers are in the business of making money. They *vastly* prefer
> to sell to an existing market, rather than try to create one.
> Technical books are a trailing indicator of interest, not a leading
> one. I can't really think of any counter examples.
>
> We already *have* good general books for introducing the relative
> newbie to Perl. Programming Perl, Learning Perl, Modern Perl &
> Beginning Perl all spring to mind. I don't think adding more is going
> to produce more Perl devs.

The fact that they behave responsively doesn't mean they aren't part
of the causative loop. Knowing you want to program something and
finding a preponderence of ruby books in the shop means you're more
likely to pick one up and learn ruby.

James