RE: T5 : [ANN] The book - (Index Appendices)
I think a character in Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Cat's Cradle has a fair bit of advice on indexing your own book (she says never). -Original Message- From: Alex Kotchnev [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 05 September 2008 05:35 To: Tapestry users Subject: Re: T5 : [ANN] The book - (Index Appendices) I know from experience that creating a good index is just a lot of grueling work . I really haven't given much thought to the topic, as it seems that it's quite far away in the future. Also, not to diminish the importance of the index; however, at this point, it is not very clear exactly what the printing options for the book are going to be (e.g. purchase on lulu, print a pdf on your own), and it's not even a proper technical book yet (e.g. no publisher or anything like that). So, once again, the index is very much in the future. Cheers, Alex Kotchnev On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 9:22 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I know this is very early in the piece, but what do you intend to do about indexing the book? The Kolesnikov Tapestry book has one of the worst indexes I've ever come across and stands as a good example of how not to do it. Having a good index is a very important part of any successful technical book. Indexing a book well is a non-trivial matter and shouldn't just be a last minute thought. I'd also suggest a good set of Appendices - one, at least, should list the components and what parameters they take. Anyway, something to think about. p. Quoting Alex Kotchnev [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I've created a new project for the proposed book at http://code.google.com/p/tapestry5-book , and posted the proposed table of contents at http://code.google.com/p/tapestry5-book/wiki/ProposedTableOfContents . Now that I'm looking at it, it's a little disappointing as the TOC doesn't really have anything new in it (e.g. some of it is covered in tutorials, other is in the project docs, etc). However, I guess that the content really can't be all that different - it's all about building web apps, covering the same materials as the other documentation. In the end, I think that the book will be different from the other existing documents based on its style and breadth of content, and not so much in the topics it covers. Anyway, I would like to create a mailing list and add everyone who has expressed an interest in contributing to the book. Unfortunately, Google Code doesn't have mailng lists, so I'll probably have to look around for that (Nabble, maybe?). Any suggestions would be welcome here. In terms of moving the proposed TOC forward, here are some of my next steps : 1. Attribute the main sections of the project documentation into possible chapters in the book. 2. Discuss feedback from this list on the content of the proposed TOC : e.g. any alternative ideas on how to organize the book, changes to the proposed chapter titles, order, etc. It would be great if there are any volunteers to investigate some of the issues that were discussed previously in the thread below, I'll probably post the needed tasks somewhere on the wiki as well. When we get our mailing list set up, I think that individuals or groups of individuals can claim ownership of each chapter (and thus get voting rights on the TOC, chapter layout, further modifications, etc. Cheers, Alex Kotchnev On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 4:59 AM, Hugo Palma [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: inline Alex Kotchnev wrote: Would there be any value to having a top-level domain for the book (e.g. tapestry-book.org or something like that), or can we find it a home for the book somewhere under the Tapestry namespace ? A top-level domain should brink more visibility to the effort. Also, in the future we could probably spend some of the monetary payback to pay for the domain and some hosting solution so that we could include the live version of the book application and other cool stuff. Still, for now i think we can live with a project on some project hosting site where we can host the book files and wiki. A note on the potential mode for governing decisions : I was thinking that in the next couple of days, I'll post a list of possible chapters to include in the book. Then, we can collect a first set of volunteers for people take ownership of each chapter. After the initial set of volunteers, the chapter owners will vote on addition of new chapters and giving ownership of chapters to new contributors (if needed). Shouldn't the outline be already created in a tapestry-book wiki ? We could decide on where to host it and then move the discussion to the dedicated list and use its wiki for the outline. On whether the book would cover additional libraries (e.g. chennilekit, t5components): I think that after we get to a good place where we have enough content on the core we can probably spend some time on those as well, possibly with contributions from the project owners. Conceptually
Re: T5 : [ANN] The book - (Index Appendices)
I know this is very early in the piece, but what do you intend to do about indexing the book? The Kolesnikov Tapestry book has one of the worst indexes I've ever come across and stands as a good example of how not to do it. Having a good index is a very important part of any successful technical book. Indexing a book well is a non-trivial matter and shouldn't just be a last minute thought. I'd also suggest a good set of Appendices - one, at least, should list the components and what parameters they take. Anyway, something to think about. p. Quoting Alex Kotchnev [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I've created a new project for the proposed book at http://code.google.com/p/tapestry5-book , and posted the proposed table of contents at http://code.google.com/p/tapestry5-book/wiki/ProposedTableOfContents . Now that I'm looking at it, it's a little disappointing as the TOC doesn't really have anything new in it (e.g. some of it is covered in tutorials, other is in the project docs, etc). However, I guess that the content really can't be all that different - it's all about building web apps, covering the same materials as the other documentation. In the end, I think that the book will be different from the other existing documents based on its style and breadth of content, and not so much in the topics it covers. Anyway, I would like to create a mailing list and add everyone who has expressed an interest in contributing to the book. Unfortunately, Google Code doesn't have mailng lists, so I'll probably have to look around for that (Nabble, maybe?). Any suggestions would be welcome here. In terms of moving the proposed TOC forward, here are some of my next steps : 1. Attribute the main sections of the project documentation into possible chapters in the book. 2. Discuss feedback from this list on the content of the proposed TOC : e.g. any alternative ideas on how to organize the book, changes to the proposed chapter titles, order, etc. It would be great if there are any volunteers to investigate some of the issues that were discussed previously in the thread below, I'll probably post the needed tasks somewhere on the wiki as well. When we get our mailing list set up, I think that individuals or groups of individuals can claim ownership of each chapter (and thus get voting rights on the TOC, chapter layout, further modifications, etc. Cheers, Alex Kotchnev On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 4:59 AM, Hugo Palma [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: inline Alex Kotchnev wrote: Would there be any value to having a top-level domain for the book (e.g. tapestry-book.org or something like that), or can we find it a home for the book somewhere under the Tapestry namespace ? A top-level domain should brink more visibility to the effort. Also, in the future we could probably spend some of the monetary payback to pay for the domain and some hosting solution so that we could include the live version of the book application and other cool stuff. Still, for now i think we can live with a project on some project hosting site where we can host the book files and wiki. A note on the potential mode for governing decisions : I was thinking that in the next couple of days, I'll post a list of possible chapters to include in the book. Then, we can collect a first set of volunteers for people take ownership of each chapter. After the initial set of volunteers, the chapter owners will vote on addition of new chapters and giving ownership of chapters to new contributors (if needed). Shouldn't the outline be already created in a tapestry-book wiki ? We could decide on where to host it and then move the discussion to the dedicated list and use its wiki for the outline. On whether the book would cover additional libraries (e.g. chennilekit, t5components): I think that after we get to a good place where we have enough content on the core we can probably spend some time on those as well, possibly with contributions from the project owners. Conceptually, it would be impossible to include all 3rd party / contrib libraries in the book (or it will always be incomplete) . I guess my point is that I think we'd want to describe Tapestry and most essential additions (e.g. t5-hibernate, t5-spring, etc). While it's true that if we go down the line of including third party libraries it will always be incomplete and maybe unfair to some i think it would be important to cover the ones that we consider the most used. We could go with a voting process where each one would say the top 2 or 3 third party libraries in his opinion. The top 2 or 3 would get included in the book. Cheers, Alex Kotchnev On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 11:13 PM, Thiago H. de Paula Figueiredo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Em Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:30:41 -0300, Alex Kotchnev [EMAIL PROTECTED] escreveu: Here are a couple of the next steps that I think would be useful in moving the effort forward: Nice! I was thinking of posting a similar set of questions here . . . :)
Re: T5 : [ANN] The book - (Index Appendices)
I know from experience that creating a good index is just a lot of grueling work . I really haven't given much thought to the topic, as it seems that it's quite far away in the future. Also, not to diminish the importance of the index; however, at this point, it is not very clear exactly what the printing options for the book are going to be (e.g. purchase on lulu, print a pdf on your own), and it's not even a proper technical book yet (e.g. no publisher or anything like that). So, once again, the index is very much in the future. Cheers, Alex Kotchnev On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 9:22 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I know this is very early in the piece, but what do you intend to do about indexing the book? The Kolesnikov Tapestry book has one of the worst indexes I've ever come across and stands as a good example of how not to do it. Having a good index is a very important part of any successful technical book. Indexing a book well is a non-trivial matter and shouldn't just be a last minute thought. I'd also suggest a good set of Appendices - one, at least, should list the components and what parameters they take. Anyway, something to think about. p. Quoting Alex Kotchnev [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I've created a new project for the proposed book at http://code.google.com/p/tapestry5-book , and posted the proposed table of contents at http://code.google.com/p/tapestry5-book/wiki/ProposedTableOfContents . Now that I'm looking at it, it's a little disappointing as the TOC doesn't really have anything new in it (e.g. some of it is covered in tutorials, other is in the project docs, etc). However, I guess that the content really can't be all that different - it's all about building web apps, covering the same materials as the other documentation. In the end, I think that the book will be different from the other existing documents based on its style and breadth of content, and not so much in the topics it covers. Anyway, I would like to create a mailing list and add everyone who has expressed an interest in contributing to the book. Unfortunately, Google Code doesn't have mailng lists, so I'll probably have to look around for that (Nabble, maybe?). Any suggestions would be welcome here. In terms of moving the proposed TOC forward, here are some of my next steps : 1. Attribute the main sections of the project documentation into possible chapters in the book. 2. Discuss feedback from this list on the content of the proposed TOC : e.g. any alternative ideas on how to organize the book, changes to the proposed chapter titles, order, etc. It would be great if there are any volunteers to investigate some of the issues that were discussed previously in the thread below, I'll probably post the needed tasks somewhere on the wiki as well. When we get our mailing list set up, I think that individuals or groups of individuals can claim ownership of each chapter (and thus get voting rights on the TOC, chapter layout, further modifications, etc. Cheers, Alex Kotchnev On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 4:59 AM, Hugo Palma [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: inline Alex Kotchnev wrote: Would there be any value to having a top-level domain for the book (e.g. tapestry-book.org or something like that), or can we find it a home for the book somewhere under the Tapestry namespace ? A top-level domain should brink more visibility to the effort. Also, in the future we could probably spend some of the monetary payback to pay for the domain and some hosting solution so that we could include the live version of the book application and other cool stuff. Still, for now i think we can live with a project on some project hosting site where we can host the book files and wiki. A note on the potential mode for governing decisions : I was thinking that in the next couple of days, I'll post a list of possible chapters to include in the book. Then, we can collect a first set of volunteers for people take ownership of each chapter. After the initial set of volunteers, the chapter owners will vote on addition of new chapters and giving ownership of chapters to new contributors (if needed). Shouldn't the outline be already created in a tapestry-book wiki ? We could decide on where to host it and then move the discussion to the dedicated list and use its wiki for the outline. On whether the book would cover additional libraries (e.g. chennilekit, t5components): I think that after we get to a good place where we have enough content on the core we can probably spend some time on those as well, possibly with contributions from the project owners. Conceptually, it would be impossible to include all 3rd party / contrib libraries in the book (or it will always be incomplete) . I guess my point is that I think we'd want to describe Tapestry and most essential additions (e.g. t5-hibernate, t5-spring, etc). While it's true that if we go down the line of
