Writing a Frameworks book at Randa

[Valorie Zimmerman]

On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 10:38 PM, Martin Gräßlin <mgraesslin at kde.org> wrote:
> On Friday 11 April 2014 00:23:26 David Narvaez wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 5:02 AM, Martin Gräßlin <mgraesslin at kde.org> wrote:
>> > we might have here a chicken-egg problem. Good API documentation would
>> > significantly help for writing the book. That is if the API documentation
>> > is good someone without deep domain knowledge will be able to write a
>> > book about it. But if the API documentation is not good enough it needs
>> > domain knowledge to write those.
>> >
>> > Now what I read out of the thread is that developers think that the time
>> > of
>> > the domain experts would be better spent writing the API documentation
>> > than
>> > writing a book.
>> >
>> > The question now is whether our API documentation is already good enough
>> > to
>> > write a book without domain experts or if we need to improve the
>> > documentation first, whether we could do this at the sprint instead of
>> > (or in addition) to writing a book.
>>
>> I have been thinking these are two orthogonal things. These are
>> thoughts I had when this idea was first posted and may be relevant to
>> this current discussion:
>>
>> O'Reilly media has these series of cookbooks. So you have
>>
>> * Programming in Perl[0]: " Programming Perl, hit the shelves in 1990,
>> and was quickly adopted as the undisputed bible of the language"
>> * Perl Cookbook[1]: "The Perl Cookbook is a comprehensive collection
>> of problems, solutions, and practical examples for anyone programming
>> in Perl."
>>
>> I would presonally like us to have a Frameworks Cookbook after Randa,
>> not a Frameworks Bible.
>
> Fully agree and that's what I hoped the book would be about. But it's
> something which requires domain knowledge. E.g. examples for KWindowSystems
> need someone to really know what the framework is doing to just come up with a
> good idea for such a recipe.
>
> I wouldn't mind to collect ideas and solutions over the time, but it's too
> late to do it at the sprint.
>
> Cheers
> Martin

I was excited to hear David Narvaez' ideas about what the book should
be. It sounds like the focus is happening. However, not many people
have committed to come to Randa and get this book started.

Right now there is one person on https://sprints.kde.org/sprint/212
listing kdebooks as their task. I can ask other people to come to
Randa to help shape the text, but we *must* have Frameworks people
committed to this project to make it happen.

The deadline for signing up is approaching. Please sign up now if you
intend to come to write. The e.V. and other funders will support us if
we step up; but I will not waste their money by flying to Switzerland
without a committed group of writers.

Valorie
-- 
http://about.me/valoriez