Re: PiL 1

[Alexander Gladysh <agladysh@...>]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 17:48, Roberto Ierusalimschy
<roberto@inf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
>> Furthermore, please do not open access to PiL 2 when PiL 3 would be published.
>
> Just for correction: we did not open the access to PiL 1 when we
> published PiL 2. It went free online a few months after we published it
> (see http://www.lua.org/news.html), years before PiL 2. It did hurt the
> sales of the printed version, so we decided not to open the access to
> the second edition.

OK, thank you for the information.

It is a bit offtopic, but maybe you care to share a relative ballpark
of damage it did (like in "20% drop")? (Sorry, that's a very rude
question, not intended in preparation for the counter-attack on the
free PiL 2 topic. I'm really curious. Feel free to ignore.)

> The book gives us more than pocket money (although not enough for a 50
> foot yacht yet). In fact, buying books is a very good way to contribute
> to the project. So, currently we have no plans to put newer editions
> free online.

> Alexander has reasons for his complain. Many people arrive at the book
> through Google, frequently landing right on a particular page. No amount
> of warning in the main page will help. And the outdated information may
> be a real source of noise.  For instance, some time ago we had to add a
> warning on a page (http://www.lua.org/pil/24.1.html), after too many
> complains that "a first example" did not work.

Thank you for the support.

> To remove PiL 1 from the site seems a too radical "solution",

Which I withdrawn. Sorry for the outburst :)

> but I think we could do something about this problem.
> One solution would be to add warnings about deprecated features (like the one about
> luaL_openlibs). That seems a lot of work. Another would be to add a
> generic warning (maybe with a link to the "Incompatibilities" section of
> the manual and adds for the second edition ;) at the top of every page.

If you could do that, would be great.

Thanks,
Alexander.