Today (Nov 15, 2002) was a milestone of sorts for Perl for Web Site Management. For the first time, the book came in at the absolute bottom of the daily Amazon sales rank comparison I mail to myself, showing how the book is stacking up against 16 other books that are at least somewhat related to it by subject matter or intended audience.
1: Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL (0596000413): 1,309
2: Mac OS X: The Missing Manual (0596000820): 1,316
3: Programming Perl (3rd Edition) (0596000278): 2,168
4: Learning Web Design : A Beginner's Guide to HTML, Graphics, and Beyond (0596000367): 2,395
5: Perl Cookbook (1565922433): 3,166
6: The Cgi/Perl Cookbook (0471168963): 3,237
7: Learning Perl, Third Edition (0596001320): 4,294
8: Perl & LWP (0596001789): 5,794
9: Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics (0596000804): 6,633
10: Object Oriented Perl (1884777791): 7,248
11: Programming the Perl DBI (1565926994): 9,320
12: Beginning Perl (1861003145): 26,231
13: CGI Programming 101 (0966942604): 35,074
14: Official Guide to Programming With Cgi.Pm (0471247448): 37,311
15: Running Weblogs with Slash (0596001002): 45,328
16: Data Munging with Perl (1930110006): 45,530
17: Perl for Web Site Management (1565926471): 48,139
This caused me to engage in some soul-searching. People like the book when they actually read it. It fills a real need, and there's an audience out there that would benefit from it. The problem is, that audience just doesn't know about it. And it doesn't seem likely that they're going to find out about it if something dramatic doesn't happen.
Which makes me think back to the conversation I had with Richard Stallman and Bradley Kuhn at the Open Source Conference in San Diego. They encouraged me to join some other O'Reilly authors who have released their books under the GPL. I gave it some thought at the time, but ultimately rejected the idea. After the insane amount of time and effort that went into writing it, it just seemed too risky. I wouldn't want to do something that would potentially weaken the book in the marketplace.
But if the book is pretty much toast in the marketplace, anyway, maybe it's not such a risk. And there's a level on which I'd just like the book to help people, regardless of whether or not I'm compensated financially for it. Also, by GPLing the book, and (probably) sticking its contents up on the Web in some sort of universally-editable format, I could address what is arguably the book's main failing (aside from its intended audience's lack of awareness of it): the fact that the code examples are clearly the product of a self-taught amateur, rather than someone who really understood what he was doing.
Please understand: the book's examples are not bad. Indeed, one of my main motivations in creating the book was to offer better examples than the really horrible stuff that beginning Perl CGI programmers seem to gravitate to, while still giving them accompanying explanations that understood where those users were coming from.
In teaching infants to talk, you don't want to talk babytalk to them, but neither do you want to read them William F. Buckley columns. There's a happy medium, where you talk to them using language that is simple and clear, but correct. My book's Perl code strives to be that, and for the most part I believe it succeeds. There are occasional places, though, where I can see now, with the benefit of the extra programming experience I've picked up, that I could have done things better. I don't doubt that more-experienced programmers could find many more such opportunities for improvement. If the book were released under the GPL, some of those experts might actually be motivated to help improve it.
Anyway, I'm going to think about this some more. Opinions invited.
I read the sample chapter (8) when the book was first published and it was good. It's the sort of thing that would have been really useful to me when I started out trying to learn Perl and do the kind of webmaster related tasks that your book covers.
I don't use the book, but it would be the first thing I shove at someone who is in that situation. Maybe if it was "How to Use Perl To Make Your Job Of Managing A Web Site A Whole Lot Easier". So how can you position it as that, after the fact?
As to the GPL, I see the market for the book as being very disjoint from the people who would even know what the GPL is.
I must confess I don't own your book, but I've read several positive reviews, and when I flicked through a copy at a bookshop some time ago, it did look rather good. When I started with Perl this would have been the book for me, I'm an accidental programmer, and came to Perl from HTML, so I think this would have been perfect for me. I think like other have said the title is a little out sync with the content - I expected a different kind of book, but I think it's a good book excluding that.
As to GPLing or other similar approaches, I'd say that an open book is quite useful. It allows the book to live on, especially if it's in ORA's "open book" format (or similar), some long out of print books are still useful. It also allows the book to evolve and keep pace with developments, so either way the book remains useful. I find on-line books useful, and if I really like them, then I'd always buy a hard copy as it's cheaper and more convenient than printing a copy out myself.
Anyhow, back to my point, what happened with your book?
