Here's a fun experiment. What would happen if everyone who read and enjoyed and would recommend a Perl book to a friend or colleague wrote a short review and published it online somewhere? It could be your favorite Internet reseller, or your local Perl Mongers site, or even a large tech news site such as Slashdot.
There are a lot of really good Perl books out there (I even have my name on a few), but they're not really getting a lot of attention. I wonder if talking about them more (and not just recommending them on Perl Monks or talking to the authors privately) would help get Perl books and Perl itself more attention in the wide world.
(If the result goes well, I suspect it would also make it easier to produce more Perl books in the future.)
The "discussions" I have seen about Perl degenerate into "write only" garbage by people who haven't looked at Perl since Perl3/4 and don't understand programming as a discipline in the first place.
That said...someone who grasps the HOP book would do well to do a review there. I have recently purchased the "Hacks" book as well as PBP. Both wonderful books.
Would it be appropriate to do one on this site? Or somewhere more Perl neutral?
Re:I would suggest Slashdot but...
chromatic on 2006-10-07T02:07:20
The nice thing about Slashdot is that it reaches many, many people and around 80% of the people who read the site never read a single comment.
(Of course, of the people who write comments, sometimes it seems that 80% are functionally illiterate, which seems odd to me.)
The site with the largest appropriate readership is the best place to start, but here is a fine spot as well. Retailer websites are great too.
Re:I would suggest Slashdot but...
sigzero on 2006-10-07T02:17:58
(Of course, of the people who write comments, sometimes it seems that 80% are functionally illiterate, which seems odd to me.)
80% seems kind of low! : )
Re:Something Blue Somewhere New
chromatic on 2006-10-07T19:40:25
Echo chamber? That's shell monks! I prefer the print or say chamber.
