[ruby-talk:02435] Re: Please join me, I'm Hashing documentation

mrilu <[e-mail]> writes:

> But I see few problems on your approach, which you might have solved already.
> 
> Your book takes some time, documentation made during that time might
> not only improve your book but help middletime newcomers.

That's true. In fact, I'm wondering if we should spend some time now
working on an HTML version of the reference material - it's a
wonderful form of peer review.

> People have time and then again get something else very important to do. 
> So I think it's quite unlikely that documentation generated by you will be
> updated for following years. It is, however, no problem for community 
> at large to keep documentation updated.

Perhaps, but I'd like to think that we'll be tracking things. With
Pragmatic Programmer, we have a response e-mail address set up. This
is actually (behind the scenes) a Jitterbug system -- people send in
e-mail, and it goes into the Jitterbug, as well as notifying Andy and
myself. We then make changes to the text of the book. The web-site is
generated from this material, so the web site changes the next time we 
say 'make upload'. In fact we have a contractual commitment wit
Addison Wesley - when they need a new edition of the book, we _have
to_ make changes to it, or they can charge us for doing the work!

> 
> So what will be your publishing policy for the reference? I could 
> easily contribute to your book efforts (for free), as long I'm totally 
> positively sure those lines of documentation won't be covered some 
> nasty legalties and basically be freezed to your web page. If you could 
> release the reference part to public domain people could contribute 
> and fix it (especially when Ruby changes) and you could still publish 
> it and get your money. I, for one, would buy the paper version for sure. 

I don't think it can go into the public domain - Addison Wesley holds
the copyright. However, before I say anything more, let me bounce all
this off our editor and find out the facts.

> Most of my discussion here was based on the fact that your excerpt 
> was missing hash.reject which was the ignition point for my exploring. :)

True - I added it just now!


Regards, and many thanks for the discussion.


Dave