[pm-h] Group project

G. Wade Johnson gwadej at anomaly.org
Thu Oct 6 16:28:05 PDT 2011


On Thu, 06 Oct 2011 09:01:09 -0500
Mike Flannigan <mikeflan at att.net> wrote:

> 
> On 10/4/2011 11:03 PM, G. Wade Johnson wrote:
> > Ben Thomas and I have been discussing an idea for an ongoing project
> > for the Houston.pm group, and I want to put the idea before the
> > group for consideration.
> >
> > The Perl Cookbook is now 8 years old. Despite that fact, the recipes
> > and examples are still quite good. Unfortunately, some were written
> > in a style that is no longer considered best practice.
> >
> > What if we began updating the recipes? Any given task is relatively
> > self-contained and understandable. One or more members of the group
> > could propose new solutions (or even complete new recipes) and, as a
> > group, we could refine them or just critique the recipes.
> >
> > People who want to hone their skills (or know of a sweet solution
> > to a particular problem) can generate a recipe. Others can help
> > refine the results to be the best we can come up with. We could
> > even keep the recipes under version control, say at github.com, so
> > that anyone has the opportunity to modify the code.
> >
> > Would we be interested in such a project?
> >
> > This could also be an ongoing solution to the presentation problem.
> > If no one is willing to present, we could devote the meeting to a
> > few recipes. These would be "hands-on" or hack-a-thon type
> > meetings, where people could get input on their recipes or comment
> > on the recipes of others.
> >
> > Let me know what you think.
> > G. Wade
> >
> > PS. For those of you worried about the copyright issues, I'm in
> > contact with O'Reilly through our User Group contact. We're
> > discussing how to make this work.
> 
> 
> I like this idea also.  It's going to take
> some up-front work.  Get somebody on that soon :-)

Yes, sir.<grin/>

> I have the Cookbook - basically the first edition
> with 2 corrections though 5/1999.  I use it quite
> often.
> 
> So we are talking about rewriting the entire script
> of the recipes, not just the code part.  That
> sounds good to me.

The original idea had been to focus mostly on bringing the code into
current practice. Maybe adding some text to explain the changes.

Now it looks like we may be able to update text and add new recipes.
O'Reilly seems quite interested in the idea of a community-driven site
that collects and updates recipes. They may be able to provide
resources for hosting and such.

G. Wade

> 
> 
> Mike
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Houston mailing list
> Houston at pm.org
> http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/houston
> Website: http://houston.pm.org/


-- 
There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the
other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious
deficiencies. -- C. A. R. Hoare


More information about the Houston mailing list