The Erlang Journal

[Bijan Parsia]

On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Joe Armstrong wrote:

> 
> I have written to O'reilly trying to interest them in a new Erlang book 
> - they were not interested

Sigh. Too bad.

> they said the market was not big enough ... ye gods - so how does it get 
> from being small
> to bug without the help of a publisher ?????????????????????

I've been trying to drum up support in ORA for alternative tech,
espeically languages. That's one reason I've been writing the various
articles for XML.com.

The didn't take a Squeak book either, and it clearly has a reasonable
market :(

They *do* do some very weird books (tiny tiny markets, IMHO), so it's very
very odd.

But I do have a sketch for "Erlang in a Nutshell" around somewhere... :)

> So instead how about a big collaborative effort.....
> 
> To start the ball rolling
> I have put a brain dump on http://www.geocities/erlang_journal/book1.html.

> Please take a look - questions we might discuss are
>    
>    - is the chapter plan ok

Quick response: It doesn't really *feel* like an ORA book (not that ORA is
the holy grail, IMHO, but if that's what you're aiming for, it's really
worth looking at Foo in A Nutshell, or Foo, the Definitive Guide, or what
have you).

The other thing is that I think organizing around common applications is
much more useful. I'd rather read about building a cool website with
erlang than MD5 authentication. That's just me, of course!

[snip]

I'm interested in contributing, as I have time.

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.