Re: Grant Proposal: Modern Object Oriented Programming in Perl

I don't want to comment on TPF. Nothing wrong with TPF but if you want responses from different communities you should be willing to return to those communities in order to get responses. There is your first bit of advice.

I don't understand why you need $4K to write a book. In college they taught us to actually read all of those parts of a book that precede the chapters like the preface, etc. Those sections show you what it took to write the book itself, so I would recommend that (if you have not done so), peruse your existing collection, sort out those that you liked best, and see if you can glean things that might help you in your endeavor. From my perspective here are a few things that might help:

Lots of authors write after work. Last time I checked publishers give you advances for book writing and/or pay for good books. Of course you will need to produce a proposal and, I think, a sample chapter.
Technical reviewers really are meaningful.I purchased one book purely because Randal Schwartz was listed as a technical reviewer. Before going too far with even your sample chapter, find some technical reviewers and list them in your proposals.
Somewhere, somehow, the author tells me how devoting weeks to reading this book will improve my work/life.Time is precious and diving into books takes time so a few words about how a book will improve my skillset is helpful.
Ignore cultural cues at your own peril. When I read your proposal I found the following which distressed me: "The starting point for the book would be C# Programming, a book available on the Wikibooks website ...the completed project would thus be made available under the same licence.. I read this to mean you are going to teach me how to program OO Perl much the same way one would code in C#. Some part of my brain, that part that motivates me to do things, suddenly starts to shut down. I don't want to code the same way one does in C# -- I want my Perl OO code to be leaner, quicker, slicker, and far more fun to produce.

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Comment on Re: Grant Proposal: Modern Object Oriented Programming in Perl

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Re^2: Grant Proposal: Modern Object Oriented Programming in Perl
by tobyink (Canon) on May 15, 2014 at 08:22 UTC

"I don't want to comment on TPF. Nothing wrong with TPF but if you want responses from different communities you should be willing to return to those communities in order to get responses."

Don't worry; I do pop in here from time to time.

I'm personally happy to respond to comments via any channel, but blog comments are TPF's official feedback mechanism, and TPF may not take into account (or even notice) feedback posted elsewhere.

"I don't understand why you need $4K to write a book."

Because I estimate that it will take around 300 hours to write, and cannot otherwise justify taking that much time off paid consulting, given that the end result will be given away freely, so I cannot expect to make much in the way of sales. At an hourly rate it works out well below normal market rates for either a programmer or a writer; indeed, it's barely above the UK legal minimum wage.

"I read this to mean you are going to teach me how to program OO Perl much the same way one would code in C#."

That's certainly not the intention. The C# book has a good chapter structure, and should be a good source of example classes to write. I'm fed up of writing "Employee is a subclass of Person" examples; the C# book has some great class names I could use, like Frog, and Room, and Employee. (Oh well... sometimes you can't escape these things!)

I draw your attention to the following quote from my grant application, which appears two paragraphs above the part you quoted:

"This would be written in a similar style to chromatic's Modern Perl book, following the same test-driven approach to development, but covering modern Perl OO programming tools, techniques, and patterns in greater depth."

So if you like Modern Perl, then I'd hope you would like this book too. And if you don't like Modern Perl, then I don't know what's wrong with you. ;-)

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