[erlang-questions] What about making sense?

[Geoff Biggs]

8) A cookbook (I don't think any of the other options adequately covers
this). The recipes books that O'Reilly produces for several languages
are so immensely useful.

Examples:
http://www.amazon.com/Python-Cookbook-Alex-Martelli/dp/0596007973
http://www.amazon.com/Perl-Cookbook-Tom-Christiansen/dp/1565922433

Geoff


On Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:41 +0100, "Joe Armstrong" <erlang@REDACTED>
wrote:
> I'd like to ask some pointed questions, the results will influene what
> happens
> next.
> 
> Can anybody point me to a good free survey site - I want to ask questions
> and get a histogram of the replies. If we can first find out *what* you
> want
> we can then figure out *how* to achieve it.
> 
> The first question is about books. I can think of the following titles:
> 
>     1)  Real beginner - lower level than the Prag or O'reilly books,
>     chatty
>          tone
> 
>      2) Theory - a theory of concurrency oriented programming - why
>          share-nothing agent programming is good. Design patterns.
>          distributed algorithms. How does leadership election work, DHTs
>          etc
>          academic in tone.
> 
>      3) How to books - take one subsystem and document all the nitty
> gritty stuff.
>          Candidates
> 
>          - mnesia
>          - yaws
>          - ejabberd
>         - asn1
>          - [you name it]
> 
>      4) How to book, with emphasis on setup. Lots of details
>          where to fetch, how to compile etc.
> 
>          (not generic - with sections for Ubuntu, OS-X and windows 7)
> 
>          one chapter/per topic
> 
>          - ejabberd
>          - mochiweb
>          - scalaris
>          - nitrogen
>          - [you name it]
> 
>      6) Case studies (business)
>          Not sure if this is even possible.
>          I'm thinking the business case behind sucessfull Erlang
>          companies.
>          What they did and why (technical stuff)
>           This is the book I'd want to read - but much is still
> commercially sensitive
> 
>      7) case studies (technical)
>           How was X built and why? Give the history. What worked, what
>           failed.
>           Basically interviews with the lead developers of each X
> 
>           For X in
>                yaws
>                ejabberd
>                [you name it]
> 
>      8) Other
>           [you name it]
> 
> Comments
> 
>  4)  and 7) seem to be the easiest to produce - just decide on the
>  chapters
> (please suggest topics) and recruit one volunteer per chapter (no
> problem with domain experts here) and an editor and some reviewers.
> 
> 3) is pretty difficult - very few people know everything about a
> particular
> sub-system - and even if they do might not want to spend thousands of
> hours documenting it - sales would be small anyway (I suspect)
> 
> 1) and 2) are possible
> 
> 7) might make a nice web site - need not be a book
> 
> I'll put these question on a survey site, so people can vote, if somebody
> can suggest one - or can we do this on the main erlang site???
> 
> Cheers
> 
> /Joe