WTF Perl Books
I was purchasing a dead tree copy of Modern Perl on evil Amazon I noticed several "you might also like" books:
Perl Language Reference Manual - for Perl version 5.12.1
I'm sure mjd might take exception to the title of the first book. Larry might be surprised he is the author of the second. The PDL folks might not care about the third.
I haven't looked up the licensing for the various documentation bits that looks to be put in a self-published context through Betascript Publishing and Network Theory LTD. To be fair, Network Theory LTD is donating $1 of the $30 book to The Perl Foundation. Gosh, how nice.
Very weird and not sure but I think rather disturbing.
I blog about Perl.
BetaScript publishing (they also use the name 'AlphaScript') are also publishing Wikipedia content in book form. more info in the comments here: http://www.chrisrand.com/blog/index.php/2010/02/27/odd-tale-alphascript-publishing-betascript-publishing/
It's disturbing only if you don't actually believe in the license that Perl actually uses. It's perfectly reasonable and expected that someone would make a Perl Language Reference Manual and charge for it. Some people might even like the price. If TPF had thought of it first maybe they could get the whole $30.
Copyright doesn't seem so weird when it's your stuff their stealing. :)
And, people can rate the books on Amazon to warn people off. :)
brian,
I haven't read the license for Perl in some time so I couldn't recall if this was ok or not.
Hell, didn't O'Reilly get its start publishing the X11 manuals?
The only book that is probably fishy, in my opinion, is the Higher-Order Perl book. It seems to trade on mjd's excellent book.
gizmo