Article:  |
A Computer Book Author's Manifesto | |
| Subject: | I want... | |
| Date: | 2004-12-04 21:50:27 | |
| From: | scottwalters1 | |
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Response to: I want...
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Ahhh, but authors are writing "real world" books. To use Java in the work place, you need more than anything an API reference set, and that's exactly what most Java books are. To use Perl, you need to know about the core modules, style, idiom, and utilities surrounding the language - that's exactly what's documented in ORA books. A book isn't going to print out a 100,000 line listing of a major project - you can find plenty of those on the 'net - but a book like Perl Medic will give you specific methods for unraveling them, adding tests to them, and refactoring them (or gutting them). It doesn't get any more real world than walking into a 100,000 line project that needs tests written and refactorings applied. These books need to be - they shouldn't be pulled from the market. However, we need a new kind of book. What would be in a Perl Hacks book? Let's see... a toy network scanner; sending broken packets using SOCK_RAW; cross compiling perl and building it static to load it a Gumstix board; using Perl for robotics control(see previous point); using SDL and Perl to draw pixels in a frame buffer or window; scripting other processes in OSX, Win32, and Linux (X can be scripted - and I really wish I knew how - but no one is cool enough to write a book on it!); implementing a user-mode filesystem on Linux with Perl; ... a thousand other things. Again, these are exactly the things that people don't normally do with Perl, don't get jobs using Perl for, but would enjoy using Perl for. I'm singling Perl out for this purposes of this example but the philosophy applies equally everywhere.
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-scott