On Documentation

24 Jun 2012

In addition, in order to grow as a community, we need on-boarding mechanisms. There are very few people who learn from nothing. We all need a little help from time to time, and a place to go when we are stuck. I personally spent years using Lasso and had been through the manuals upwards and forwards before I dared post to LassoTalk.

Even more pronounced is the fact that the "number of books" on a subject is considered a key performance indicator of the prevalence of a language. In other words, popularity or fashionability of a language is based on going to Amazon and typing in "Lasso Programming".

Um, don't. It's embarrassing.

With these considerations, this is the place where Lasso falls smack on its face.

It is here also where we have the greatest opportunity to create a competitive advantage. Eric Landmann pointed out that during the days of the Inline Curtain, he was forced to look outside Lasso as a matter of business continuity. When he did, he looked to PHP, and found a messy, decentralized pile of crap. Finding something relevant or useful took longer than anything.

One thing which we currently do not have is a pile of crap. (We don't even have that). What little we do have is good, but for Lasso 9, we are very, very short of material.

If we did have a superb set of literature on the subject of Lasso 9, we wouldn't need to have thousands of crappy books on the subject. I personally bought probably 50 books on Javascript over my time as a developer, and only one ever stuck. I've never even bothered to buy another DNS book after DNS and Bind.

It's not about how many books, but about how good they are. It won't hurt to have a few books to choose from.

So, over the next 18 months, we are going to focus on creating as much superb documentation as we can, through as many mechanisms as we can. I consider it a personal goal over the next few years to develop as many of these as possible regarding Lasso 9;

1. An O'Reilly book on Lasso 9
2. An "Idiot's Guide" to Lasso 9
3. A set of core reference guides similar or better than the Lasso 8 Guides.
4. A few "Boundary Pushing" books on Lasso 9
5. A book on security and speed tips for Lasso 9
6. Some walkthrough Guides
7. A PHP/Python/Ruby to Lasso comparison Guide

In addition to this, I've collected some other ideas I'd like to share with you, and thought you all might be able to help with.

• I'd like to identify a few of the author's of some of the best books in other languages. Once we know who the best books are out there written for other languages - convince their authors to write one of those books for us. So my question to you is: what is the best programming book you know?
• I'd like to get a community-built multi-authored book started, where different experienced individuals from the community write a chapter each on various meaningful subjects and we edit them all and compile them all into one strong book. Everyone gets to pad their resume a bit, and we get a good book out of it. All profit goes back to the writers. Anyone up for being part of this endeavour?
• I am also interested in hiring a technical writer full time who has both the key programming skill (theoretically it doesn't need to be Lasso), and superb technical writing skills. If you know such a person, please have them contact me.

Oddly enough, we have a number of clients who are major publishers, and I am sure they will work with us to turn the various books into a reality. Heck, worst case scenario - we can Lulu.com it.

Thanks for the feedback!

Sean Stephens

CEO
LassoSoft Inc.