From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2004-03-24T08:24:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Need some advice on PickAxe II

In article <144550921062.20040324080518@soyabean.com.au>,
Gavin Sinclair  <gsinclair@soyabean.com.au> wrote:
>On Wednesday, March 24, 2004, 5:24:31 AM, Phil wrote:
>
>> I'd have to agree with the list you have here.  Perhaps it would be 
>> interesting to analyze the questions that people have been asking on
>> c.l.r/ruby-talk to figure out which libraries to cover in-depth.
>
>The problem is that there are lots of libraries that are useful but
>people perhaps don't know how to use.  The book should redress that
>balance, not enhance it.

Right, the idea was that libraries that people ask questions about the 
most should be documented the most (given some threshold).  The theory 
being that people aree going to ask the most questions about the 
most in-demand libraries because people are trying to use them more 
often (but it could also be that they ask the most 
questions about the libraries with the most confusing APIs which could 
skew the results).  

I'm not sure there's any easy way to automate this analysis, though.  
Could be that 'OpenSSL' got mentioned a lot in February, but the question 
was something along the lines of "Should we add support for cipher X into 
OpenSSL", for example - that wouldn't really be a question about using the 
OpenSSL lib.

....but don't mind me, I've been working on an Ant Colony Optimization 
(ACO) project for school.  In ACO you tend to be interested in the 
most-travelled paths so I'm probably thinking too much along those lines. 

Phil