Hi, I am trying to get more into BOOST than what I am using currently (which is quite minimal compared to what BOOST has to offer these days) and which does not include a whole lot of new things that have got into BOOST. Are there any BOOST professionals willing to come up with a COOKBOOK for using BOOST libraries? The book "Beyond the C++ Standard Library: An Introduction to Boost" has a decent coverage but is quite dated compared to the leap BOOST library suite has seen in the recent days. As a user of BOOST, I request someone with good knowledge to come up with a COOKBOOK (like the PERL/PYTHON cookbook) for the benefit for BOOST users. It could be modeled along the PYTHON COOKBOOK. Activestate has a site to submit recipes and those are taken up, polished and edited into a nice book. with best regards, dhruva -- Dhruva Krishnamurthy Contents reflect my personal views only!
-----Original Message----- From: boost-users-bounces@lists.boost.org [mailto:boost-users-bounces@lists.boost.org] On Behalf Of dhruva Sent: 01 September 2007 15:52 To: BOOST users; BOOST dev Subject: [Boost-users] A need for a COOKBOOK
Hi, I am trying to get more into BOOST than what I am using currently (which is quite minimal compared to what BOOST has to offer these days) and which does not include a whole lot of new things that have got into BOOST. Are there any BOOST professionals willing to come up with a COOKBOOK for using BOOST libraries? The book "Beyond the C++ Standard Library: An Introduction to Boost" has a decent coverage but is quite dated compared to the leap BOOST library suite has seen in the recent days. As a user of BOOST, I request someone with good knowledge to come up with a COOKBOOK (like the PERL/PYTHON cookbook) for the benefit for BOOST users. It could be modeled along the PYTHON COOKBOOK. Activestate has a site to submit recipes and those are taken up, polished and edited into a nice book.
with best regards, dhruva
-- Dhruva Krishnamurthy Contents reflect my personal views only!
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 This message (including any attachments) contains confidential and/or proprietary information intended only for the addressee. Any unauthorized disclosure, copying, distribution or reliance on the contents of this information is strictly prohibited and may constitute a violation of law. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately by responding to this e-mail, and delete the message from your system. If you have any questions about this e-mail please notify the sender immediately.
On 9/3/07, Hughes, James
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
How about if O'Reilly agrees to publish it (I do not represent nor anyway related to O'Reilly)? Since most COOKBOOKS are carried by them. Many are quite popular. We could start having a place holder to host for recipes submitted by community. Python cookbook gave a free printed version for every recipe accepted in the printed version (1 book per author irrespective of the number of recipes accepted). A good reward to motivate people to contribute. with best regards, dhruva -- Dhruva Krishnamurthy Contents reflect my personal views only!
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.
Hi,
On 9/21/07, Steve Toledo-Brown
brief overview discussion. There's still obviously a significant editorial effort involved, but it's not really like writing a book.
Thank you for explaining in detail. I really wish something like this kicks off. Even before we have a book in printed version, just collecting them in a central location will be of great value for beginners. That can be a very good starting point. I personally start with the "Learning" series of books followed by Cookbook and later to "Programming" and "Internals" series. The cookbook exposes the breadth and this something a beginner/newbie needs before he/she can adopt a new technology (library or language or...). with best regards, dhruva -- Dhruva Krishnamurthy Contents reflect my personal views only!
-----Original Message----- From: boost-users-bounces@lists.boost.org [mailto:boost-users-bounces@lists.boost.org] On Behalf Of Steve Toledo-Brown Sent: 21 September 2007 11:01 To: boost-users@lists.boost.org Subject: Re: [Boost-users] A need for a COOKBOOK
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.
That's sounds like a good idea. I always prefer examples to raw/technical explanation - I find things so much easier to understand that way (I refer you to the Boost::filesystem TR1 Documentation, very difficult to understand without examples, where everything becomes instantly clear!!). Is this 'cookbook' idea currently in use for Boost?? James This message (including any attachments) contains confidential and/or proprietary information intended only for the addressee. Any unauthorized disclosure, copying, distribution or reliance on the contents of this information is strictly prohibited and may constitute a violation of law. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately by responding to this e-mail, and delete the message from your system. If you have any questions about this e-mail please notify the sender immediately.
Hughes, James wrote:
That's sounds like a good idea. I always prefer examples to raw/technical explanation - I find things so much easier to understand that way (I refer you to the Boost::filesystem TR1 Documentation, very difficult to understand without examples, where everything becomes instantly clear!!). Is this 'cookbook' idea currently in use for Boost??
Guilty as charged for the TR1 docs, but then it's more a meta-library, and you should follow the links to the Boost.Filesystem library for the details! BTW we already have a wiki (http://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/), would you like to start up cookbook project, and start adding some recipies? John.
Steve Toledo-Brown wrote:
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.
Given this explanation I figured that I might actually do something with the idea. I'm just in the process of configuring a web site which uses our web application framework - which is a C++ framework that makes very heavy use of Boost, so we'll be eating our own dog food :) Or at least I will. I've spend the day configuring a new site and writing some code to handle the bits that the site will need that fall outside of the core framework. The site is fairly basic, especially in how it looks. I'm not going to have time to do any real work on the CSS this weekend so it'll be just content. The features will be a wiki page for each recipe. Categories for the Boost libraries that the recipe uses and history of wiki and listing changes. There will also be discussion forums which have a very simple issue tracking system on them (a thread can be marked Open or Closed if it describes an issue with the site or a recipe). There will also be some RSS and Atom feeds available from the outset. I'll also put up some meta pages for discussing how it works and how it ought to work. As I've been doing this today (Saturday) and the code we will install on our main server tomorrow was frozen on Thursday I'm going to put it up on a new live server. As the server is new and I need to test it, I might as well do so with this code. If nothing goes wrong with that there should be something running by the end of the weekend. If the new server doesn't work out then it will have to wait a bit until either the server is sorted out or we get an install window on the live server. A final disclaimer. I personally have ambitions of getting into technical writing which is one reason for me doing this. My company wants to show of its framework which is their reason. The framework is not open source yet, but will be. At the moment we're having trouble deciding whether to use the GPL or a reciprocal license. We'd prefer the latter, but suspect nearly everybody else would prefer the former. Kirit
Hi,
On 9/22/07, Kirit Sælensminde
A final disclaimer. I personally have ambitions of getting into technical writing which is one reason for me doing this. My company wants to show of its framework which is their reason. The framework is not open source yet, but will be. At the moment we're having trouble deciding whether to use the GPL or a reciprocal license. We'd prefer the latter, but suspect nearly everybody else would prefer the former.
I just hope we never lose the communities interest. Frankly, I personally would feel more comfortable if it is hosted on boost.org A privately held company hosting a WIKI based setup to get the community involved should not end up making it propitiatory and have a COPYRIGHT since it was hosted on their servers. We just need to be cautious. I do appreciate the fact that someone has seriously come forward, it is a good step forward. -dky -- Dhruva Krishnamurthy Contents reflect my personal views only!
dhruva wrote:
I just hope we never lose the communities interest. Frankly, I personally would feel more comfortable if it is hosted on boost.org A privately held company hosting a WIKI based setup to get the community involved should not end up making it propitiatory and have a COPYRIGHT since it was hosted on their servers. We just need to be cautious.
Unless everybody contributing assigns their copyright to my company (which was never going to be asked for) then the company won't end up owning anything that it doesn't already own. Each contributor will retain copyright on what they contribute. What is really of question here though is what license contributors agree to by contributing. Personally I think that the descriptions will need to be fairly permissive, something like the Creative Commons attribution license (CC-by) and the code needs to be under something very permissive, something like an MIT or BSD license but without the need to attribute or include any copyright notices. People need to be able to copy the code into their own code base without needing to worry about any legal ramifications of doing so. Turning the code over to the public domain is probably closest. As for the community interest, I guess we will see whether it garners any traction or not once it is turned on. If a more official Boost organisation wishes to take on the site then we will provide the software and the data for that. Just to make this absolutely clear, my company's commercial interest in this is to promote its software, but the content of the site. As the software that runs the site is built with Boost it seems an appropriate way of doing it and giving something of use back to the Boost community.
I do appreciate the fact that someone has seriously come forward, it is a good step forward.
Thank you. I hope that I will get enough of it done in the next few hours to put it live. K
participants (5)
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dhruva -
Hughes, James -
John Maddock -
Kirit Sælensminde -
Steve Toledo-Brown