On Saturday, October 4, 2003, at 04:12 PM, John Von Essen wrote:
> I actually think the O'Reilly books are BAD for beginners.
I strongly disagree, so far as the actual beginners' books (Learning
Perl et al) are concerned. (Don't interpret that as a silent slam on
the other books.)
But to ****ft the topic:
I watch the O'Reilly Top 25 Bestsellers list fairly carefully, and have
been somewhat disturbed to see that Learning Perl Objects, References
and Modules barely hit the list for a week or two, then dropped off.
That surprised me--I assumed there were a fairly large number of Perl
users at exactly the right intermediate level for that book to be of
interest to them.
So why didn't that book sell better? Both Learning Perl and Programming
Perl consistently stay on that list, usually fairly high up. I doubt
that Randal and Tom turned out a turkey, and even if they did, that
wouldn't (I think) depress initial sales if there were good demand for
such a book, only subsequent sales. An optimistic interpretation is
that sales will, after the first spurt at publication time and the
subsequent drop-off, slowly rise, but that would be more convincing if
there weren't already a large Perl user community. Maybe there's
already another book aimed at the same target demographic, but I can't
think of one.
So what (if anything) does that mean? I can come up with many
explanations, but the one sticking in my head is that there are two
levels of Perl users--cluebies and japhies--with widely separated
levels of knowledge, and not much middle ground between them.
For what it's worth, I think I'm a member of that middle ground. Hardly
a day goes by that I don't use Perl (objects and references and
modules, oh my!) in my mostly non-programming DBA job, but I'm probably
not ever (barring a lot of unexpected free time to study and learn, not
too likely now that I'm a father) going to be twiddling the core of the
language or writing major applications (I topped out at around a
thousand lines of code) with it. If there aren't many people at my
level climbing up (maybe there are, and I'm just projecting my own
failure to do so, a possibility of which I'm quite aware), what does
that mean for the future?
Am I on to something here? Or am I just a pessimistic worrywart?
Or both,
John A
see me fulminate at http://www.jzip.org/
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