[jifty-devel] Jifty Book needs...

Andrew Sterling Hanenkamp sterling at hanenkamp.com
Tue Nov 27 15:06:26 EST 2007


In an attempt to improve the documentation available for Jifty, I've begun
the process of putting together a book for Jifty. It's designed to be a
combination tutorial, reference, best practices guide since we kind of need
all three. It won't be superb at any of those roles, but we don't need it to
be. Jifty's API docs do a reasonably decent job at getting to the details,
what we need is a good introduction at 10,000 feet level. Yet, I'm just a
guy and have a family and a real job to attend to, so I'd love some help.

Jesse and I started this process shortly after OSCON and we've got what I
think is a pretty good outline for the book. The current state of that
outline has been posted to the Jifty repository under:

http://svn.jifty.org/index.cgi/jifty/browse/Jifty-Book

If you're interested in how everything is structured, I recommend starting
with the README file in that directory and then reading the POD in
Jifty::Book and then moving to the individual chapters under
Jifty::Book::(Part-[A-D]|Appendices)::... Some of this will almost certainly
get restructured, but it's a good start.

The next step for me is getting the tutorial for the book figured out. We've
set it up to have a running tutorial throughout the book to help illustrate
what each chapter is about. However, we haven't completely settled on what
the tutorial should be. Jesse has suggested Spensive and after looking at
it, I think it's a great candidate. I'm open for other ideas if anyone has
them.

Unless someone makes another suggestion that looks better, I'm going to
continue working with Spensive to learn how it works, clean out it's busty
innards, improve it's documentation, and clear up issues with the current
tests. I'd appreciate help. Once I get it in a state where I can run it
cleanly, I'm going to start filling in the chapter outlines regarding the
tutorial and then start filling in the book as I have time. I hope to spend
a good chunk of my Christmas break and perhaps take some time off from work
in January to try and get things going.

Cheers,
Sterling
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