Tim,

What do you think about publishing books in the spirit of John Lyons comentary on UNIX for open source software. I understand the trouble of the moving target. But lets say you published a new version each year.

Example: The perl comunity's comentary on perl for 1998.

Maybe you could come up with a standard format for documenting source code. Something like pod. Or maybe Literate Programing via Knuth and XML or something that could help in the publishing. As good as the web is I still like a book.

Robert

Robert,

This would be a cool idea, but like a lot of cool ideas, it needs a guiding spirit. We'd be happy to publish such a thing if it existed, but it is not a top priority project for us. We have so many things we need to work on that we aren't getting to as it is.

In the end, publishing is a cooperative enterprise between authors and publishers. We initiate projects that we consider very high priority, and respond to important but lower priority projects that walk in the door, and bless and encourage projects that seem worthwhile but are not necessarily able to create enough sales for a published book.

We're thinking of doing some more online projects that might create a home for efforts such as this, but it would still need to be an effort driven by someone in the particular community that is interested.

Note that we do actually have a couple of "source code internals" books in the works, but they aren't community driven in the way that you suggest.

--Tim

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