[racket] (Not really) a book on Racket

On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 6:20 PM, Grant Rettke <grettke at acm.org> wrote:
> Writing books is hard from what I hear.

Indeed.

> Lot of Racketeers individually want to do it.
>
> Perhaps there is an opportunity for collaboration?

We'll see. I've set out my stall, more or less. There is a reasonably
detailed plan and the intro chapter more or less says what I want to
do. My views have changed slightly since I wrote that. I believe a
brief introductory chapter or three is necessary, and I see the
remaining project focused chapters as optional.

> The Real World Haskell book was pretty interesting:
> 1. Developed as a wiki.
> 2. Determined the amount of the book that was peer-reviewed via the wiki itself.
> 3. Released in print and online.

My understanding is that it was written by 3 ppl with feedback (but
not content) from "the community". My experience with the Scheme
Cookbook is that a few dedicated ppl are more productive than the
crowd sourcing approach. The crowd will read and fix errors but not
generate large amounts of original content.

Had I the time, I would write a detailed TOC, then measure what people
click through to read, and then write the book that people actually
want. With self publishing this could be reasonably worthwhile. I
estimate a lower bound on sales at 500 copies, and an upper bound at
5000 (based on some research I can't find right now).

Cheers,
N.