Re: PiL 1

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 4:53 PM, Enrico Colombini <erix@erix.it> wrote:
> typical language course took about three months to design and six months to
> write and revise.

Six months sounds like sheer luxury ;) After signing my contract with
Que for C++ by Example I had three months!  But I had spend a lot of
time thinking about the proposal, and an insane amount of work put
into the interpreter that accompanied the book.  Que's editorial
support was very good. And then the tech book market fell off a cliff.

> The demon here is "reader fragmentation".

Oh yes, that's the big demon!  'Know thy reader' is the first
commandment, but there's a whole room of different kinds of readers!

I'd say the focus should be on applications - doing things with the
language. And people need to do such different things ... although
having a rich multimedia experience is pretty essential these days
with the young crowd.

Alexander's lua-cookbook project continues, when he can find time.  My
current writing project is an online (interactive) tutorial in a
similar style to the Gotour.

steve d.