From: Celeste Suliin Burris
To: ask_tim@oreilly.com
Subject: Dearth of Macintosh Books
Tim,
As a Unix System Admin and a Perl fan I have found your books indispensable. My computer of choice is a Macintosh, and I do quite a bit of AppleScript and Perl for that machine. As long as your booklist was chiefly Unix-based, I could understand your ignoring the Mac, but lately it is one of my "annoyances" that you ignore the Mac market.
I chiefly use the editor BBEdit from BareBones, and it supports grep and your book Mastering Regular Expressions is one of the Mailing List's Bibles. I believe a book from you on AppleScript would be wonderful. You've been "scooped" on MacPerl by Prime Time Freeware's wonderful book, but I doubt it would have been published if there weren't a Market for such books.
Another thing is that Apple now makes MPW freely available on the internet, but I cannot find an "in-print" book on the subject I would run, not walk to buy one from O'Reilly.
-- Celeste
Celeste,
As I've said many times, it's not just a matter of finding topics, it's also a matter of finding good authors. BBEdit, MPW, and AppleScript are all good subjects for a book. But we need good authors and good proposals.
Editor's Note: If you do have a good proposal that you'd like O'Reilly to consider, please take a look at Writing for O'Reilly.
--Tim
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