Hi,
I know it would be a great effort. The point I was trying to show
is that this makes the difference. I am playing with Prima, and as
you saw in my posts on the in => and the other on pack, there
are both strange behaviors and lack of understanding. But the
second could actually be a lack of explaining. What is obvious to
the developer is not obvious to the user. I can insert a button,
at at some time becomes mandatory to set the pack, an its
parameters?
And if there is problem with some function, that way would not be
the first line the section, as the examples are always tested.
I am pointing to the need for a change in perspective. Apart of
the effort required to make something in this different direction,
the stress on reference material is wrong. It helps who already
knows, but it is a malediction for any other, as it gives the
illusion to support the adoption of the toolkit, and it is not the
case.
People able to use reference material probably wrote it, or could
have written.
My cat wakes up in the morning and, at first, looks for something
to eat. In the same way, we should wake up in the morning, and,
at first, looking for a publisher, or at least not trying to look
for some reason the reference material suffices.
It is at least deprecated to make a module without a test suite,
independently of the effort it requires. It is a wind-up, but it
should become deprecated also to build a toolkit and leave behind
a good adoption strategy, both by hand and by looking for a
publisher.
Good module, but where are the tests?
Good toolkit, but... is there a book?
I am directly facing the problem, trying to write something about
Prima to make it more simple to adopt, so it is not a talk to
talk.
On 7/8/2012 5:12 AM, David Mertens wrote:
Fabio -
Writing real books, both for PDL and for Prima, would be a
monumental effort. I think they would be well worth the effort,
but just getting what we have in PDL::Book was hard enough. The
Prima community seems to be less active than the PDL community, so
I'm not sure if they have the tuits to assemble a similar
document. That is, their efforts are probably better spent
elsewhere.
Ultimately, getting an edited book needs to be part of a larger
marketing strategy for PDL. As it is, I am very happy that we have
the PDF book that we have, and I am turning my attention to
getting App::Prima::REPL user-ready. Once I feel that this
interface has stabilized, then I might turn my attention towards
actual conversation with chromatic (at Onyx Neon) to see what we
would have to do just to get our book "in the door," so to speak.
However, this is far into the future, and I have many other things
keeping me busy before I ever get to that. If somebody else beats
me to it, that'd be great.
I expect that PDL::Graphics::Prima will draw these two communities
closer together and I hope that it, along with App::Prima::REPL,
manages to grow both communities. At this point, I think that your
efforts to write a series of blog entries targeted at users new to
Prima is absolutely perfect. We don't have the manpower to write a
full-blown Prima::Book, but your blog writing will give newcomers
a gentle enough on-ramp that they will be able to get started.
David
On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 9:22 AM, Fabio
D'Alfonso <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hi,
I have the PDL Book. It is a great effort, but with some
oddities that are not simple to solve.
It is a step forward, compared to Prima itself, where
there is not something similar (ignoring the cited book
about Tk).
The point is not having the stuff printed, and having a
cover. A book is something quite different to its content.
Going to O'Reilly would mean a process of reading, proof
reading, validating, rewiriting what is not consistent,
reordering subjects in better ways, changing examples,
adding images as needed, formatting the material to have
in one page if the need to turn the page would be a
problem for reading.
Draft are read by people that validate that content in the
perspective of the reader, and check the validity of the
content.
At least, this makes a book.
A book is a job of authors and at least other 10 people.
Yes it could be a great idea to contact O'Reilly, and the
PDL Book could help very much. But Mastering PDL would be
another thing.
On 7/7/2012 3:27 PM, Joel Berger wrote:
What can save, in this sense, Prima is the avaialabilty of the "Mastering
Perl/Tk", that shows many features in common with Prima (ot that Prima
ported) as the geometry manager. For PDL there is nothing out there that can
act in this way.
So if one is looking for a marketing tool, that means creating the
conditions to have a book on the bookshelf.
I know that the PDLporters just finished at least a working copy of
the PDL::Book; is you concern that it be "dead-tree available"? If so
I'm sure they could shop it around, Oriellly or Onyx Neon come to
mind.
Joel
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