autarch writes "Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason, written by Ken Williams and I, is now available at booksellers of distinction across the country. It covers Mason from the basics on up to extending the Mason core with your own subclasses, so there's something here for the whole family to enjoy. For more details check out our web site and the O'Reilly site."
written by... I
Re:What?
kwilliams on 2002-10-23T18:31:42
Perhaps this is a good opportunity to thank O'Reilly for their editing help in this book. I now understand as an insider why their books get to be so good - they provided lots of help for us when we needed it (for instance, in order to bring the book closer to the Safire Standard), and generally stayed out of the way when we didn't.
Anyway, we hope the book will be judged primarily on its core content, and we have a forum for receiving user feedback. There are bound to be errors more substantive than this one that snuck through.
-Ken
Re:What?
mshiltonj on 2002-10-23T19:05:23
What is the Safire Standard? Google was of suprisingly no help in this case.Re:What?
jdporter on 2002-10-23T19:32:12
That would probably be a reference to the so-called "Saffire's Rules for Writers"; Here's one of many places you can find it on the web.Re:What?
autarch on 2002-10-23T20:49:28
I don't generally review my use Perl story submissions with quite the same amount of intensity that I devoted to the book. I would venture to say that I read the entire book at least 5 times straight through, not including the times when I reread individual chapters.
I'm much more likely to buy it if I can review it on Safari first. Especially with technical books, I really appreciate the ability to completely review it before buying it. And, if it's like some of my other recent purchases, I'll also subscribe to it on Safari. I can't carry around all the good books I need, so having them available on the Web is great.
If you have any say in the matter, please encourage O'Reilly to put it up on Safari. I think it's a win/win/win for you, the publisher and me.
Re:Safari
chromatic on 2002-10-23T19:56:57
It will be available on Safari. As far as I understand, all new books (and all old books still in print) are made available to Safari. The conversion takes a little while, though, depending on the original format of the book.
I probably shouldn't tell you when to expect it on Safari, and certainly don't have an exact number, but it would make a nice early Christmas present.
:) Re:Safari
jordan on 2002-10-23T20:33:06
The excellent Perl & LWP was actually available on Safari first, by several weeks.
But, as you say, the conversion takes a little while, though, depending on the original format.
Kudos go to Sean Burke for using an easy-to-convert original format!
Re:Safari
kwilliams on 2002-10-29T20:49:42
I'm not sure this is quite true - for the Mason book, we wrote it in POD (for which lots of converters exist), which was auto-converted to Docbook (for which lots of converters exist), which was auto-converted to FrameMaker. My guess is that if O'Reilly has auto-conversion tools for Safari, they probably will work fine on one of those formats. But that's a guess - I don't actually know very much about the Safari process.
Also, since O'Reilly did all their editing in FrameMaker, our original format is largely irrelevant at this point. The canonical version is currently the FrameMaker version, and it would have been this way regardless of what other format we wrote it in originally.
Anyway, Jordan - the Mason book's content will be available online at the book's web site as soon as we get the canonical electronic version back from O'Reilly (FrameMaker back to POD) and we can HTML-ify it.
-KenRe:Safari
dug on 2002-10-23T20:29:25
From the masonbook.com website, the entire contents will be freely available online.
I use HTML::Mason on the job, daily. I just ordered my copy from O'Reily and am excited about it for a few reasons.
- I like to have a textual reference guide next to me while I program
- I like the voice and technical know-how of both of the authors from the mailing lists
- I want to support future Mason development and reward it so far.
Thanks, Ken and Dave, for your hard work. -- dugRe:Safari
jordan on 2002-10-23T20:35:18
Oh! Even better!
I was quite disappointed once when I subscribed to a book on Safari, only to find that it was available, legally, somewhere else on the net for free.
It turned out that the book was hardly worth the price at free.
Re:Safari
autarch on 2002-10-23T20:48:04
I should point out that if lots of people _only_ use the free version (and not Safari or print) then the chances of there being a 2nd edition or more Mason books such as a cookbook are _really_ slim.
ORA has to make money to be able to publish books and pay authors. And while the financial rewards for writing a book are really not much compared to the amount of work it requires, I still don't think Ken or I would have been willing to do the work we did for $0.00.
If you want to wait to check it out online for free, great. If you like it and still don't buy it, that's not so great:( Re:Safari
jordan on 2002-10-23T21:57:30
If the book is worthwhile, I will buy it. I've purchased several books that are available free on-line to support the author/publisher.
I probably won't subsribe to it on Safari if a free on-line version is available, however. I just can't see shelling out a monthly fee for something I can get for free. Maybe for a few months, to show my support, but there's got to be a point where I'd be paying too much, don't you think?
Now, if O'Reilly used this as a justification for not putting it up on Safari, I'd completely understand.
Re:Safari
Thomas on 2002-10-24T03:30:34
But being able to check out the online is key for me too. I saw most of the CVS book by Karl Fogel was online on http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/ and was amazed by the quality, so I instantly ordered the book, just to support the authors choice of opening up the book. Have you thought of only having like half of the book available on the site so people could justify getting the book for the "rest" of the book?Re:Safari
ziggy on 2002-10-26T03:18:07
Sadly, that book appears to be out of print. (I believe the publisher folded.)Re:Safari
autarch on 2002-10-23T20:43:24
From the masonbook.com [masonbook.com] website, the entire contents will be freely available online.
I should point out that this might take a little while to happen, because there are some challenges ahead of us in doing this.
For the curious, here's the deal. The book was written in a mostly-POD format ORA calls "pseudo-POD". It's basically POD with a few extras like R<>, which is used to indicate text that is "replaceable" (like a host name), or U<>, for URLs.
Then ORA converts this to DocBook XML internally, and again to FrameMaker for publication. At some point during this stage, the editors made a number of changes to make the book not suck. But those changes were not made in the source format (pseudo-POD).
So we need to somehow integrate those changes. That's challenge #1. ORA tells us they should be able to convert from FrameMaker back to pseudo-POD, so it shouldn't be _too_ hard to do.
Then we have to convert the pseudo-POD into HTML ourselves. Thankfully, Sean Burke finally released his Pod::Simple modules so that POD parsing no longer has to suck. And his design makes it easy to handle the pseudo-pod extras. Yay Sean!
But it'll still take some serious coding to do the conversion. I figure it'll be online sometime in December or January, at best.
The nice thing about being able to distribute it online is that we'll be able to release updated versions reasonably often, once we have our tools in place. And of course if people are really motivated, they could send proposed changes as diffs, cause we'll make the POD source available too.
I do hope ORA puts it in Safari though.[OT] Pod::Simple
Matts on 2002-10-23T20:51:47
Thankfully, Sean Burke finally released his Pod::Simple modules so that POD parsing no longer has to suck. And his design makes it easy to handle the pseudo-pod extras. Yay Sean!
FWIW, Pod::SAX has a very similar design to Pod::Simple, and will provide you pretty much the same interface to your "pseudo-POD" as Pod::Simple would. All this and it's been doing it for about 6 months now.
As the first perlpodspec compliant parser it's a shame it gets overlooked so much.Re:[OT] Pod::Simple
autarch on 2002-10-23T23:18:20
It's just a bit lacking docs, don't you think?
But yes, looking at the code I can see how it's comparable to Pod::Simple. Sean's modules do have the advantage of supporting multiple parsing "styles" and being somewhat better documented, and since they're still in beta I'm assuming the final version docs will be more complete.
