Re: Re: "waldschrotts guide to nifty references" - manual page draft, version 0.9b

At 00:56 21/08/2000, eschmid+sic@s.netic.de wrote:

On Mon, Aug 21, 2000 at 12:16:55AM +0300, Zeev Suraski wrote: At 23:46 20/08/2000, eschmid+sic@s.netic.de wrote: Uhm, the manual isn't nobody's personal toy, and the editor role in that sense is technical, not 'strategic'. Up to now its very technical, but IMHO it could be in the near future strategic.

Well, what I meant to say is that as far as the strategic direction goes, the editor's voice is not any more important than any other voice.

I really see no point in the manual competing with the books. If you try to be everything, you end up doing a poor job. I'd concentrate at having a good reference manual (and by design and layout, it is a reference manual, rather than a book that tries to teach you what PHP is), without making strict rules as to what should go in and what shouldn't. The loose guideline should be that things that are beyond descriptions of what a certain feature or function does should not be in the manual. People can add examples in the annotations, but I don't see in-depth discussions or tutorials as things that belong in that manual. I haven't said that the manual is for newbies. There is another good book by Julie Meloni. Have just received one copy from Julie yesterday. If the nature of the manual should be only a reference manual, thats a bad idea. Every author can compile a book with more function references in it. If he or she has time, can also provide a example to every function and that book looks IMHO ugly. What the current manual needs is a complete function reference and a good language reference for PHP 4.

I don't understand you really. You say that if the manual remains a reference manual it's a bad idea, and then you say it needs to be... a reference manual.

What I have in mind is to sell the manual as a book on demand. We have here many printing companies who feeds a machine with a PostScript file and at the end there comes out a book which will send to the buyer.

How is that related? Again, as the manual is GPL'd, anybody can sell it with or without our consent (we basically gave our consent already). We can try to create our own hardcopies. I still don't see how it's related to what this manual should or should not be. Are you interested with competing with other books? Why? Zeev -- Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> http://www.zend.com/