Hughes, James wrote:
All very well asking, but writing a book is a very time consuming and difficult task, then you have to get it published, otherwise you have spent a year of your life with no income (or two years of your spare time - and who has that any more). I'm amazed that the current docs are even as good as they are.....but would agree that there is a lack of consistency which I believe the boost:docs projects is aiming to fix. Whether it will is anyone's guess.
James
The "writing a book is a very time consuming" problem is to some extent mitigated in the cookbook model, which Dhruva didn't really explain fully. There's a website to which any user can submit recipes - typically a code sample illustrating a useful technique using some aspect of the technology in question for a specific purpose, with a brief discussion. Some recipes are idioms, some are more like mini-patterns. Over time hundreds of these recipes build up on the website. Deriving a book means collecting a sample of the best/most widely applicable recipes by a distributed effort. Typically you'd have one reviewer per area/chapter/theme who'd choose recipes and write a brief overview discussion. There's still obviously a significant editorial effort involved, but it's not really like writing a book.