About five years ago I ran a few training courses under the Perl School brand. The idea was simple – if you price training courses cheaply and run them at the weekend then you eliminate the most common reasons why people don’t keep their Perl knowledge up to date.
Of course, it’s not quite that simple. And I think I ran six courses before running out of attendees.
But there are still people who would benefit from getting some more up to date information about how Perl works. So I’ve decided to resurrect the Perl School brand in a new attempt to spread the Modern Perl knowledge beyond the echo chamber. I announced my plans during my lightning talk at last month’s London Perl Workshop.
This time I’m going to do it by publishing cheap books. You might remember that time I promised to write a guide to modern web development with Perl and how badly that ended up. But in the process, I learned a lot about publishing ebooks to Amazon. I even gave a talk where I suggested that Perl book publishing could become a cottage industry. And that’s what I’m currently aiming at.
I’ve made a start already. just before the LPW I published a book called Perl Taster which aims to take people through their first two hours of learning Perl. It’s cheap enough (and small enough) that people can give Perl a try without investing too much money or time.
But my plans don’t stop there. I have ideas for half a dozen other books that I can publish over the next few months. Basically, if you’ve one of my training courses over the last five years then you can expect a (short!) book based on that course to appear at some point during 2018. Currently my plans include books on:
- Moose
- DBIx::Class
- Modern Core Perl
- Dancer2
- Testing
Obviously, there are plenty of other books that could be written this way. And I don’t want to have to write them all myself. Which is where you come in. Is there a Perl-related subject that you’re an expert on? Would you be interested in writing a book about it?
I’m offering to help people publish Perl books. If you can write a book using Markdown, then let me take care of the complicated bits of turning your text into an e-book and getting it published on Amazon (and, perhaps later, other e-book platforms).
So, over to you. What do you want to write a book about.
p,s. At some point I should probably finish the e-book I was writing about publishing e-books.
I would suggest it may be easier for people to write mini chapters of books rather than a whole book. I feel a newbie even though I have using Perl for years (self-taught, Stack Overflow and PerlMonks), but I would suggest you create a theme….e.g. Mathematics on Perl, Game making on Perl, GUI applications in Perl, IOT applications in Perl, Raspberry Pi and Perl and get people to contribute their personal applications in chapter form to edited and compiled by yourself.
I like Connie’s suggestion about creating themes. I would like to see a little of all those given, and possibly tossing in a test case for those to round out the topic. Attempting to learn Test::Simple and Test::More now. Would be fun to create something on the Pi for Perl.