The Perl 6 book at Wikibooks has begun. This morning I threw down drafts discussing some basic ideas about variables, sigils, and contexts. As much as I wish I could have run Synopses 2 through some kind of POD2Wikitext translator and just posted that.
I was realizing as I read through S02 this morning that it's really quite a complex document and is pretty inaccessible to people who aren't familiar already with Perl and programming ideas in general.
The book however really needs to be accessible to all audiences, including people who maybe haven't programmed Perl 5 before, or people who haven't programmed in a dynamic language before, or even people who have never programmed at all. We have to start off with baby steps introducing little terms and little ideas first and then slowly building up to the bigger ideas.
Writing this book is not going to be a fast process, but I have a handful of pages drafted up so far and would love to get some feedback on them.
The Perl 6 Book at Wikibooks
It would be helpful for the reader if the as-yet-unwritten parts were marked "[todo]" or something in the table of contents.
This, of course, requires more editing effort and would have to be kept up to date to be useful.
An "[in-progress]" marker might also be helpful.
Re:TOC suggestion
Whiteknight on 2009-01-18T14:08:10
That kind of thing might be helpful, yes. Normally when we write books, the chapters that haven't been created yet have red hyperlinks instead of blue ones. However, when I created this book I used an automated editing tool that I've been developing, so all the pages were created with some boilerplate stub text.
Since the book is in such an early stage right now, it can be assumed that all pages are "in progress". I may put a note on the TOC about this, and maybe progress markers on each page.
