At 06:44 PM 3/29/01 +0800, Stas Bekman wrote:
> > Indeed, I've often wished O'Reilly would provide book sources for people
> > that have bought the treebook. Manning has something like that, you can buy
> > the ebook cheaper than the actual book, and then if you decide to buy the
> > treebook it's that much cheaper.
>
>I agree. Meanwhile you can always get the source by helping others to
>review books :)
>
> > /me goes off to read a certain book which he'd promised to review but
> > hasn't quite finished...
>
>make sure to grab the latest version of the sources though, we have done
>lots of small patches in the last days...
>
>I wish others who have promised to help to review the book were actually
>helping us :( We gotta release it asap, but the book was hardly touched by
>reviewers... I guess we will just release it as it is... don't be
>surprised if there will be some glitches in it... what can we do...
You shouldn't worry so much. Considering that the mod_perl guide was an
open source effort in the first place, I suspect the book will have already
been quite well reviewed even if you've added a lot.
Our first book 7 years ago has a really stupid Y2K bug (stupid because the
code says it takes Y2K into account and then goes on to not...) and oh
yeah, some race condition in some of the file-based locking code...and ...
we didnt use taint mode... and... files were opened without explicit > and
< operators...and....
In the end though, for the audience of our book, we had gotten much more
praise than flames. The important thing was that we released something to
enable people to start coding web apps that were very highly documented
relative to other free web apps written in Perl. And regardless of the
quality -- still *at the time*, higher quality than many other free web
apps. So in the end, I think we would have done a disservice by vetting the
book more technically and waiting another year than the way we did it --
just release it.
Of course, it didn't help that our publisher cheated and took rough drafts
of chapters instead of the final versions we submitted the night before the
deadline because they wanted to get a head start on their own editing
process (we didn't know) ... But in the end, I think it was still good to
have released the book.
And in history, there were some technically good points about what we had
released compared to what existed at the time. eg I know for a fact that
there were several CGI/Perl teaching books that taught people to send mail
using the TO field as a command line parameter to mail opened with a PIPE
with no real input validation rather than using sendmail -t to pipe all
To's and From's plus validation (much safer)
Hmm, is this encouraging? I meant it to be.... I think with so many people
having reviewed the base document (even with a lot of stuff added to the
book), I bet your book will be much better written than our first book.
Well, I have a 30 hour flight coming up soon... perhaps I should download
the sources. Then at ApacheCon we can all give you are reviews from our
long flights. :)
