Date: 9 Feb 2005 21:15:59 -0000 To: mjd-book@plover.com (Higher-Order Perl announcement list) Subject: "Higher-Order Perl" is now in press Organization: Plover Systems From: Mark Jason Dominus Message-ID: <20050209211559.22121.qmail@plover.com> If you forgot what this list is about, or you don't know why you're getting this message, please see http://perl.plover.com/hop/ To unsubscribe, send a blank message to mjd-book-unsubscribe@plover.com. ---------------------------------------------------------------- What's in this message: * Current status * This mailing list is going away * The Cover * Indexes * Online version - volunteers wanted * Buy me * New book coming ---------------------------------------------------------------- CURRENT STATUS ************** The book is now in press. All of the writing, design, layout, composition, editing, indexing, illustration, and correcting is over. The physical copies of the book are now being printed; later they will be bound and shipped. Unless some printing disaster occurs, I will hold the advance copies in my hands around March 9, and books will be in the warehouse a week later. When production started back in May it was supposed to take three months; it has taken nine. And it is not over a minute to soon, because I am burnt out. Thanks to all of you for sticking with me through it all. ABOUT THIS MAILING LIST *********************** This mailing list will receive * one * more message, when my advance copies arrive, and then will shut down forever. If you're interested in hearing about the status of my other books, please send a note to mjd-books-subscribe@plover.com Either way, thank you for your continued interest. THE COVER ********* A couple of people told me that they had seen pictures of the cover on bookselling web sites, and wanted to know why the pictures had appeared on those web sites before I showed them to the faithful subscribers of my mailing list. The answer is that the pictures on the web sites are only preliminary, tentative designs, and not very similar to the design we ended up using. If we had settled on a cover design sooner, I would certainly have let you all know about it right away. But we just nailed it down last week. The real cover looks like this: http://perl.plover.com/hop/cover.html INDEXES ******* In my last message, I said: The O'Reilly folks used to tell me that they had their indexes done by a professional indexer, and this was better than having the author do it. . . . I've always had my doubts about the professional indexers. I no longer have doubts about the professional indexers. I have made up my mind. It is better to do the index myself. The publishers will tell you that the professional indexer will think of all sorts of things to put into the index that you would not have thought of putting in yourself. This is true, but it is not actually an advantage. One of the very late changes I made to the book was to delete the entry lowest-precedence operator, 437 from the index. The referenced sentence was: Regexes are similar in structure to arithmetic expressions, only with fewer different operators. The lowest-precedence operator is the vertical bar, |. I can think of a lot of things in that sentence to index: operators precedence in regexes, 437 regex operators, precedence of, 437 vertical bar (|) as lowest-precedence regex operator, 437 But "lowest-precedence operator" is not one of them. But that's far from the weirdest thing I had to delete. No, that prize was taken by a choice so bizarre that for two weeks, everyone who came to visit my house was presented with a printed copy of the relevant sentence and forced to guess what part of the sentence had been selected by the indexer for inclusion in the index. Now this delightful game has come to the web. Visit http://perl.plover.com/hop/indexgame.cgi and match your wits against the professional indexer's! After the book is available, my web site will have a form on which you can suggest additional index terms, and a link to download an improved, revised version of the index. In the meantime, an almost-up-to-date version is available at http://perl.plover.com/hop/index/ In case you were wondering, here is how I made the index: 0. Go to the drugstore and buy a small spiral-bound notebook and a set of adhesive tabs. Attach the tabs to the pages of the notebook and label them with letters of the alphabet. 1. While proofreading, take note of any terms or phrases that should be listed in the index, and put them on the appropriate page of the little notebook, with page numbers. If you meet them again, add the page numbers into the book. 2. Type in the stuff from the book, sort and format it. I thought perhaps the low technology vibe might amuse some of you. I just finished reading a book about the history of alphabetization (as research for my future book on the history of digital information processing up to 1945) and I was quite tickled that the method I used was essentially the same as the one that was first invented about 1800 years ago by the librarians at Alexandria. Actually there was a higher-tech step at the end: 3. Convert the PDF files of the proofs into text files, with one page per file. For each index entry, grep for it in the text files and check to make sure there are no significant references that you missed. I guess the Alexandrians probably did not do anything too similar to that. ONLINE VERSION - VOLUNTEERS WANTED ********************************** I promised that after HOP was published, I would put the contents online for free. There are some technical difficulties which will delay that. Basically, the HTML files I have represent a much earlier stage in the book's evolution, so I need to take the PDF or TeX files from the final stage and either turn them into HTML or merge the differences into the HTML that I have. I'm not sure just what I'll need to do, but I may need help with it, whatever it is. If you'd like to volunteer to help, please drop me a note. BUY ME ****** You can buy the book online at all the usual places. You can also order the book through my web site at http://perl.plover.com/hop/ORDER.html If you do this, I get an extra kickback. If you can get it cheaper somewhere else, that's good too. NEW BOOK COMING *************** Tim Cox, my editor at Morgan Kaufmann, likes the Red Flags book. He wants to send the chapters out for review right away. With any luck, this one will not take so very, very long. (Obviously I am a glutton for punishment. But he has promised that we will not send this one to be typeset in Bangalore.) If you want to follow the progress of the new book, and any other books I might happen to write in the future, please send mail to mjd-books-subscribe@plover.com or, if you want to subscribe the address fred@example.com, send mail to mjd-books-subscribe-fred=example.com@plover.com (Notice that the @ has turned into an =.) I expect that the new mailing list will get no more than a few posts a year, just as this one has. If you don't subscribe to this new list, then you will NOT get announcements about the new book or free samples from the new book. You will get one automatic invitation to join the new mailing list, and after that if you have not subscribed to the new list, I will throw away your address as I promised. Thanks again for your patience and continued interest.