The effects of the PerlDancer 2015 conference are still alive. After everyone got home, the idea of merging all the individual efforts made to write a book into one common project became real.
We launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to cover the printing/publishing/shipping costs of the first official PerlDancer book. This book is going to be written by the core-team members of the project, which guarantees the best advices possible about PerlDancer (version 2).
The topic of the book is to cover the creation of an e-commerce application, from the very beginning up to the point where you can authenticate, store objects in a database and even provide social sharing buttons to the customers. Along the way, we’ll cover loggers, sessions, views, plugins and all advanced feature you could want to use when using PerlDancer for production-ready developments.
Beginners won’t be thrown in the e-commerce app without notice though, as the very first chapter will be dedicated to cover the main philosophy of the framework and teach all the essentials about good web programming practices.
In clear, we want to describe a real-life application, with lots of pedagogy and with a strong business-oriented view. Indeed, we know that the times when PerlDancer was used only to write small ReSTful services are over, companies now trust it enough to build their entire website with it.
The book writing process will be entirely transparent, with the repository hosted on GitHub, it will be made in a pure open-source philosophy. Backers will surely love to be able to check the progress of the writing process commits by commits.
We aim at raising 15K euros, in order to cover the printing and shipping costs of 500-700 copies of the book (we’re still studying options regarding the publishing methods). At the time of this writing we’ve reached 20% of the target, and we have 26 days left. Time is running fast.
The remaining money is going to be used to market the book and possibly to buy some time for the authors, when needed. Definitely, having that money will make a massive difference in focusing the efforts and making that book a reality.
It actually already made a huge difference, all the energy spent into making the Perl community aware of the Kickstarter campaign resulted in massive collaboration for bootstraping the project. We’re currently heavily hammering the table of contents, which is also our roadmap. Our plan is to finish it by the end of the week, so we can start writing chapters in parallel next week.
Let’s do this.
Help us if you use PerlDancer and like it, back us on Kickstarter and get a printed copy of the book.
