I've been slacking a little bit on the Perl 6 book recently, because there has been so much other "high priority" work on my todo list. I do it to myself of course, taking on more projects then I can reasonably do in a short period of time. It's part of my mentality where I like having lots of little projects that I can jump back and forth between to keep my interest level high.
This works great for software projects where "commit early, commit often" leads to smaller changesets. I can make a change and then kick off the test suite, and then do some book work while I wait for that to complete. Yesterday was one of those days, I was doing some calling conventions work for Parrot (which I'll talk about in a different post), and was able to get some good book work done simultaneously.
Yesterday I added stubs for three chapters: "Junctions", "Lazy Lists and Feeds", and "Metaoperators". All of these are big topics, and I've barely scratched the surface with any of them. I always find the hardest part is getting those first few words and headings on a page, after that it's just filling in the blanks and expanding on stuff that's already there.
I have two blank pages in the middle: "Language Extensions" and "Operator Overloading". These are both meant to follow and build upon the chapters on Grammars and Regexes. I'm thinking I may combine these into a single chapter and talk in a single place about modifying the Perl 6 grammar itself. I'm still not sure about all the particulars of that, so I'll hold off on it for now.
The other day I put out a call for help on ParrotBlog to get some readers, reviewers, and contributors for Parrot documentation. I'd like to put out a similar call or this book: I would like to get some help with the Perl 6 book on Wikibooks. Readers, reviewers, editors, contributors, all are needed. Contributing examples of working Perl 6 code, especially if that code demonstrates best practices, is most necessary. Any feedback I can get, no matter how small, would be very much appreciated. This book is still in development, but things will go much faster if more eyes are reading it and more hands are working on it.
Perl 6 Book at Wikibooks
