Re: perl books

* Uri Guttman ([email protected]) [10 Jan 2002 11:15]:

[...]
> others should need to be nominated and voted/rated in. why have cobol
> for dummies here?

Because someone who knows Perl has an opinion on it.

I'd like to think that books.perl.org would have a Perl slant on the
reviews and so on - they're books that Perl people like or dislike.

Naturally, I would expect the interface to be able to ignore books
without a certain number of reviews, or like Dave mentioned, without
reviews from someone whose opinion we care about.

If I'm looking for a book on TCP/IP, I'd rather some Perl guy recommend
one than some person I've (a) never heard of (b) isn't likely to think
like I do.


Of course, we run into the problem of reputation - we know which Perl
books are good by either reading them when we're sufficently well versed
in Perl, or by reading reviews by people sufficiently well versed.


Who's to say that a review of O'Reilly's new PHP book was written by
someone who knows the slightest bit about PHP. Whereas a review of a CGI
book by Lincoln Stein carries some weight.

And would a review of the PHP book by gnat be weighted? (As he's editor
- not that he's probably likely to review it, but the point is a
hypothetical one).


So I think we'd need:

  + Reputation areas - so we can say that books on topics covered by
    relevant modules should probably have the module author's opinion
    weighted up.

  + Something about producing competing books possibly. Not sure. e.g.
    people providing reviews of books that compete against their own
    books.



cheers,
-- 
iain.                                          <http://eh.org/~koschei/>