Re: mod_perl marketing

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> During those projects,
> the only place where I saw it clearly stated that mod_perl is "program
> Apache the way you like in Perl" instead of "CGI on steroids" is the
> Eagle Book - which for the record, is an O'Reilly book titled "Writing
> Apache Modules in Perl and C" by Lincoln Stein and Doug McEachern, and
> the name "Eagle Book" comes from the fact that the cover animal is,
> you guessed it, an eagle
> (http://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol4_3/tpj0403-0014.html). Even
> *that* bibliographic data was a pain for me to retrieve from the
> mailing list archive!
> 
> Online documentation on anything in the mod_perl guts is very, very
> scarce, and I had to RTFS more than once even to perform basic
> mod_perlish tasks such as writing a subclass of Apache::RegistryNG.
> Even the Eagle Book itself is sub-useful in places (e.g. the infamous
> ass_backwards stuff), and other parts of the Apache API visible from
> mod_perl has to be guessed from the "writing Apache modules in [...]
> C" section. At least this is how things were two years ago: 

I feel I need to interject here.  _all_ of the points you raise to this
point are well covered in the mod_perl developer's cookbook, which has been
available since  02/2001.  in fact, that's why we wrote it - both to address
many of the things the mod_perl community had learned since the eagle book
was written, as well as take the "access to the C API in Perl" road.  we
hardly even mention Registry or CGI (but we do mention how to subclass
RegistryNG :) and that was very, very on purpose.

the unfortunate situation is that the cookbook suffers from lack of exposure
(and sales, for that matter) - you obviously understand mod_perl and are
participating on the list, yet you still didn't know that your issues are
(and were) well covered with available documentation.

anyway, at this point, that we wrote a book that nobody seems to be using is
less of a complaint than a simple fact of life, so I guess it doesn't make
sense to discuss it further.  just venting a bit...

--Geoff

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