I think you raise valid points that I think Nathan and the reviewers should take on board when they do this chapter and subsequently review it.
However...
1) I believe that rather than entirely naysay that some common cookbook items can be covered in a mod_perl chapter, I would prefer to see what Nathan et al come up with rather than discourage them from trying at all.
Will it be "futile" as you suggest? Maybe. But then Nathan and the reviewers can choose to cut the chapter.
Will it be too complex and therefore cause problems for readers? Maybe. But I think I would trust Nathan and his reviewers to judge after it's done. And again, there is the option of always cutting that chapter as mentioned above.
In my past writing life, I've cut plenty of chapters when after seeing a whole book, deciding that they didn't fit (or worse, where it just was a bad chapter I wrote). I suspect Nathan has done the same in his lifetime and I would trust his professionalism in this manner.
In other words, I think we should trust that Nathan et al have been writing/editing for a long time.
Can they make mistakes? Yes. No one is perfect. But I also trust that their experience will allow them to come up with something for this chapter which will suit a market need. And if it doesn't, to not use that material.
But I think it would be sad not to try at all since there could be benefits to this chapter.
2) Will mpdc lose sales? I suppose so. Short-term maybe.
But then should Stas stop publishing his book? MacEachern and Stein theirs? Surely they also overlap with mpdc. And there will be other books by other publishers that will overlap with mpdc as well.
I suppose that I feel like I am more of an economic optimist than you.
While short-term, it may appear that more mod_perl books being released would cause fewer sales in a market that is "fixed", long-term, I believe having more written material about mod_perl will actually help the market.
Provided it is done well, I think a chapter in TPC that covers mod_perl explicitly is a good idea also for spreading mod_perl community advocacy and learning.
Nick Tonkin wrote:
On Wed, 11 Dec 2002, Nathan Torkington wrote:Actually, we do cover mod_perl--we published the Eagle book, "Writing Apache Modules ..." way back in 1999.Yes, I have had my now dog-eared copy since then :)There's no way that 20 recipes in the Perl Cookbook will compete with the what, 250? in the mod_perl Developer's Cookbook. Especially when the introduction and each recipe points the reader to the mpDC. The Perl Cookbook has over a hundred thousand readers. I want to push as many as I can onto the mpDC. If that's competing, then I can only say that you have a strange sense of competition :-)Ahem, well, without wanting to get into a fruitless argument about this part, I might say that you have a strange idea of how to push people onto their book. At close to $50 a pop, I know I'd think twice about purchasing the mpDC if I'd shelled out for the Perl Cookbook and it had a section on mod_perl. I venture to say Geoff et al will see less overall sales, rather than more, if the PCB has a mod_perl section. This notwithstanding the fact that _some_ people _will_ no doubt have their appetite whetted and move on to the definitive mpDC. (Of course there's nothing definitive about Perl, that's the whole point about TMTOWTDI, right?)Trying now to cover highly complex topics like "Authenticating in mod_perl" in a recipe in a chapter of the Perl cookbook is futile. It will only serve to oversimplify and lead novices into a false sense of competence.This was really my point.The Perl Cookbook has never pretended to be the definitive guide to anything it covers (have you seen the Perl Cookbook? I recommend it :-). Each recipe includes references to definitive sources of information (manpages, web sites, and other books).I have also owned the Perl Cookbook since it came out. It's very useful as exactly what it says: a cookbook. You can turn to it for a recipe to accomplish a small, simple task which you guess others may have tackled before you. You can also use it as a tutorial, if you choose to, by studying each chapter as a whole. I do not believe that mod_perl lends itself to the former, and I think that the mpDC more approaches the latter. One can go look up a recipe, true, but it is useless without a pretty thorough prior understanding of mod_perl. So, I stand by my prediction that just putting a few mod_perl recipes in the PCB will lead more than a few people into more problems than solutions. While I've been writing this reply a few people have responded to your request for content suggestions. Stacked handlers, among other things ... I think it just goes to show that there can be no successful trivial coverage of mod_perl. (That's why the Eagle book, and the mpDC, are so good.) - nick ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Nick Tonkin {|8^)>
