On Tuesday 29 August 2006 18:57, brian d foy wrote:
> In article <200608282247.35033.shlomif@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, Shlomi Fish
>
> <shlomif@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> > Now as I've mentioned before there are several huge problems with
> > learn.perl.org:
>
> Your definition of "huge" is probably colored by "I didn't invent it".
>
No, it's not.
> > 1. It hasn't been maintained in several years now.
>
> It's been updated for perldoc.perl.org (which is a lot younger than
> "several" years) and lists the latest edition of Learning Perl, which
> we published last year.
OK, these are incremental improvements. But they are still not enough to
make
it up to par with http://perl-begin.berlios.de/.
Who did the modifications? How can I or anyone else who desires maintain
it
further?
>
> > 2. Its front page contains a list of books, most of which are not
> > available online and nothing else.
>
> The front page starts with a pointer to the Perl do***entation. The
> list of books are at the bottom.
>
This is very easy to miss due to the page design.
> The first paragraph has links to www.cpan.org and www.perl.org. Between
> those two, you have links to all of the im****tant Perl information.
Unless I'm mistaken, there isn't a link to any of the following resources
there:
1. http://perl-begin.berlios.de/
2. http://perlmeme.org/
3. Any of the tutorials on http://perl-begin.berlios.de/tutorials/.
4. http://perl.net.au/
5. http://perl.wikia.com/
6. Many other resources linked on http://perl-begin.berlios.de/
Besides, these things belong in learn.perl.org too in a good place in the
navigation menu. If people have to follow a relatively obscure link to a
different site to get there, they probably won't.
>
> Who cares if the books are available online? Those are the books I
> would recommend to people.
You probably meant "Who cares if the books are not available online."
Well,
expecting someone to learn by a book he has to purchase is an admission of
defeat. Welcome the Internet and Web 2.0 age. You can learn PHP fully from
online resources. You can learn Python fully from online resources. Why do
you have to buy a book in order to learn Perl? Unless of course, you don't
want people to learn Perl without having to default on buying a book.[1]
And the books don't belong on the front page[2]. They should be placed in
a
separate page freeing the front page for the introduction, some links, a
navigatio menu, "What you can find on the site", etc.
>
> The "Online Library" link takes you to a page that has the full text of
> several books available for free online.
Fair enough. I didn't complain about that. Nevertheless, there should
still be
some navigation links with other categories useful online resources (see
above). At the moment - there are none.
>
> > 3. There aren't any links to online tutorials anywhere on the site.
>
> Which tutorials do you want listed?
>
These for instance:
http://perl-begin.berlios.de/tutorials/
And there are others on:
http://perl-begin.berlios.de/tutorials/#other_lists
> > 4. There aren't any links to other im****tant online resources (wikis,
> > mailing lists, etc. either.
>
> As I showed earlier, it already links to www.perl.org, as known as "The
> Perl Directory". That's the only im****tant link it really needs.
>
I disagree. People are less likely to follow a not-so-obvious link to a
different site, instead of just repeatdly hitting all links in the
navigation
menu. And as I demonstrated, even www.perl.org has some big ommissions.
> Mailing lists on the front page: tips, beginners, beginners-digest,
> beginners-cgi, beginners-cgi-digest, release-announce, jobs
Not all mailing lists:
http://perl-begin.berlios.de/mailing-lists/
>
> There is also a pointer to nntp.perl.org.
>
That's good.
> > 5. The beginners-workers mailing list is closed for subscribers and
has
> > become
> > completely unresponsive.
>
> Completely unresponsive or just unresponsive to you?
It was completely unresponsive to me at least, when I tried to get it to
integrate my work on what was to become perl-begin into learn.perl.org. No
one responded despite several emails. When I asked the perl.org admins how
to
subscribe me to the list, I received an "it's a closed list" reply. My
request to be added to it was not answered.
> I don't see any
> reason it needs to be open to all subscribers, either, especially if
> you are going to lie like you do in this post.
I see many reasons for it to be open to subscription:
* http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
* Possibly also http://producingoss.com/
(which I didn't fully read yet)
may
have some insights.
If people can subscribe to this mailing list, it wouldn't mean that I or
anybody else will be given a permission to send input there (as I already
can, because the list is unmoderated). It just means that other people can
also receive these emails, respond to them, and possibly act upon them. So
more people will become involved.
As for me "lying": I love it when geeks accuse me of "lying". If I'm not
mistaken, the verb "to lie" has strong negative cronotations. (In English
as
well as Hebrew). Whenever I hear people say that to me, I say to myself "I
am
not a lier - what a jerk!". So if you want to have a good rule of thumb
for
tactfullness, it is to never accuse a fellow FOSS contributor of "lying".
Always take a minute to paraphrase your sentence more diplomatically
I have offered to donate some of my time and knowledge to work on
learn.perl.org and pointed several problems with it in the previous email
and
this one. Is this the kind of gratitude I deserve?
Best regards,
Shlomi Fish
[1] - I should note that the currently-hyped Ruby-on-Rails suffers from
the
same problem. When I asked fxn whether there's a good tutorial I can learn
Rails from, he told me I should buy the Pragmatic Bookshelf book about
Rails
(which isn't available online). He wasn't aware of any decent online book
or
tutorial.
A different person on the Ruby-on-Rails channel on Freenode, said I should
just learn from reading existing Rails code. %-)
[2] - see:
http://www.mail-archive.com/advocacy%40perl.org/msg01819.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish shlomif@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.shlomifish.org/
Chuck Norris wrote a complete Perl 6 implementation in a day but then
destroyed all evidence with his bare hands, so no one will know his
secrets.
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