Missing the facts

merlyn on 2006-03-25T18:29:33

He says:

But what is beyond forgiveable is that Perl 6 has made the market of new Perl books nonexistent. This alone assures Perl's eventual nonexistence. Why would an author want to write a Perl book that is obsolete in some fuzzy time period.

To which I replied:

We just released the 4th edition of "Learning Perl" last summer, and "Intermediate Perl" this month. We're very committed to keeping the flagship tutorial books for the Perl community up to date until Perl6 arrives. There are also a number of other Perl books in the pipeline at O'Reilly that I cannot comment on.

If other publishers are slowing down on turning out the junk that spells Perl in all-caps and promises a complete Perl education in some small number of hours or days, that's actually better for the community, not worse.

---

Man, what did he put in his tea?

Aristotle on 2006-03-25T19:52:26

What with Higher Order Perl, Perl Best Practices, Advanced Perl Programming and Intermediate Perl, the last 12 months have been one of the best Perl 5 book periods ever. Heck, advocates of other languages are cheering HOP and PBP, fer crying out loud!

but there's nothing new in those titles

hfb on 2006-03-26T09:09:59

Aside from MJD's HOP, it's the same shit, different title.

Besides, he's correct in a lot of his other points....there are a few perl6 titles that are of no use to anyone save for the true believers and then there are the rehashed perl5 books that don't exactly cover any new ground.

Re:but there's nothing new in those titles

sigzero on 2006-03-26T20:25:57

it's the same shit, different title

Really? I thought PBP was different. I think Pro Perl Parsing/Debugging was different. The O'Reilly books are updates in a lot of ways that I would't agree with your statement on.

Re:but there's nothing new in those titles

hfb on 2006-03-27T05:51:29

PBP was ok, but again, nothing new and not really totally aimed at the perl market either. The parsing/debugging book I haven't seen, but it, too, probably is just a mashup of the debugger pocket ref and the testers notebook. Updates are not new books covering new and interesting topics, just a rehash of the same old, same old.

Re:but there's nothing new in those titles

sigzero on 2006-03-27T13:12:13

But what is beyond forgiveable is that Perl 6 has made the market of new Perl books nonexistent.

But in context he is wrong. Whether it is the "same old same old" or "new"; people are buying those books. The market is obviously still there.

And now he has “replied”…

Aristotle on 2006-03-31T11:53:36

If “replying” is what you’d call reiterating all his points while completely ignoring the counterpoints, anyway.