From: Euan Mee <lucid@...>
Date: 2002-03-30T23:51:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Matz's book ??

On 30 Mar 2002, at 23:10, Pat Eyler wrote:
> On Sat, 30 Mar 2002, Michael McDaniel wrote:
> > > "The Ruby Programming Language" is a very important book
> > > project. I hope you'll find a new publisher, who shares this view.
>
> Has anyone approached Manning about a ruby book?  (The've done
> some very nice Perl books.)  I traded emails with one of their
> editors asking about it.  She mentioned that they were'nt sure
> what the market for w ruby book would be -- this looks like a
> great time for a grass-roots campaign.

IMO:

I suspect that pointing out the recent Award nomination (was it the Jolts?) 
for Ruby might be a useful indicator for editors.

Other useful facts to present would be:

*  total downloads of Ruby implementations.
*  monthly downloads of Ruby implementations in time-series, to show growth 
trends, per month, and cumulatively

* total number of Ruby-list subscribers
* total number of Ruby-list subscribers at each month/quarter end,  to show 
growth trends

* No. of 'hits' returned from a Google search on 'Ruby Programming Language', 
and monthly updates, to show trends.

The key thing to show to the publishers is that Ruby is not insignificant 
now,  that it's significance is growing, and will be significant in the 
timescale that it takes to get to book publication time.

Do any of the folk on ths list have any of these numbers?

Can the people who have access to these numbers start collecting the time-
series now?


Cheers,
     Euan
xlucid@users.sourceforge.net

'I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance,
Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance'
 - Ogden Nash