That sounds like a view based on the presumption that a cookbook's purpose is to teach you how to make a spoon out of a fork, and vice versa. I think a cookbook can be just as much about teching the basic workings of how to make the tools do the work for you, so people don't try to invent their own objects, mappings et cetera through arrays, strings and whatnot. Or to write C code, or Basic, in Pike.

Of course it would not be a book for you, or for me, but it would still be useful to those new to the Pike mindset, as much as the other (more ambitious) book being discussed. A recipe that basically only points a newbie to how the MIME module, or Locale.Charset.(en|de)coder modules are employed to do Really Powerful Stuff, is very much better than a recipe that shows a Perl hacker how to do something similar a tenth as easily and with ten times more bugs, by hand.

If eighty percent of the book was covered by the refdocs already, but in a less terse and requiring-a-working-knowledge of Pike basics (as we prefer to keep the refdocs to the point) manner, I'd still call it a very useful book indeed.

/ Johan Sundström (achtung xmas!)

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2003-12-22 15:42: Subject: Re: More conference items: book and mailing list

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I'll restate that cookbooks in general is a bad idea. If something is so complicated to do that you need a recipie, you either should introduce a language construct or make a module.

/ Martin Nilsson (saturator)