From: Leonard Richardson <leonard.richardson@...>
Date: 2005-10-21T01:26:59+09:00
Subject: Re: Seeking Contributions for O'Reilly's Ruby Cookbook

I see lots of good recipe ideas in this thread; thanks to everyone for
your help. Please keep the ideas coming.

Regarding the Perl Cookbook recipes: many of the recipe ideas in our
outline are in fact borrowed from other O'Reilly cookbooks, especially
the Perl and Python cookbooks. We figured this would be a good starting
point, especially since many elementary recipes show up in more than
one cookbook. But all else being equal, we would prefer to use recipes
that demonstrate Ruby-specific idioms, or give a Ruby twist to recipes
that are common across programming languages.

I agree that the focus of the recipes should be helping people with
specific problems rather than systematically covering aspects of the
language. I think some parts of the cookbook show this focus well (even
at the risk of repeating ourselves across recipes), but other parts
still need work. As with other O'Reilly cookbooks, each chapter will
have an introduction giving a basic overview of the features covered in
the chapter, leaving the recipes free to show specific techniques.

We definitely want more GUI recipes, but I don't know what techniques
they should illustrate. PDF creation, SQLite integration, XML->YAML
mapping, specific web service integrations, etc. are all great ideas.
I'd like to have a section on system administration tasks, but I'm not
a sysadmin, so I'd like to hear from Ruby-using sysadmins what recipes
they'd like to see or share.

Right now the best way to see whether a recipe in the outline has been
written is to email me and ask about it. I've put up a progress report
on the Cookbook webpage, but it's just a rough indicator. So far we've
written about 75 of the 300 recipes in the outline, and almost all of
them are from chapters 1-8 and 12. That should give you a rough idea.

Leonard