Finally, the public beta programme begins!
January 21st, 2008 by Bryan O'Sullivan
I’m pleased to announce that the book site now has real content! We’ve published the first handful of draft chapters for public review.
Service updates, most recent first:
- 2008-01-21 18:00 PST: load problems resolved. Thanks for bearing with us!
- 2008-01-21 12:00 PST: the server is being hammered at the moment. If you’re having trouble accessing pages, or submitting comments, it might be best to wait a bit for the load to settle down. Sorry! This is mostly a good problem for us to have
Our internal reviewers have already provided over 2,250 comments on the first drafts that we wrote. To those reviewers: thank you! Today’s chapters include many major revisions as a result of your thoughtful feedback.
The book has an integrated comment system; please use it to tell us what you think. We’d love to know about every detail you think we should improve upon: more appealing examples, better descriptions, clearer wording, you name it.
We’ll periodically add new chapters and revise existing drafts. When we do, I’ll post a note here.
Thanks for your impatience and enthusiasm. We’re excited to finally be sharing our work with you!
It might help to send people to book.realworldhaskell.org.nyud.net, which will route them through the Coral content distribution network (basically “Akamai for everyone”). Though for that to work, the CoralCDN servers themselves need to manage to get through to the server to begin with…
Congrats on getting to this milestone. I’m enjoying the book so far.
I really like in ‘commentable’ presentation app. Could you describe some of the background to this - was it built just for this book? Is it open source? What format do you actually write in? DocBook?
I hope you can release your currently planned outline for the complete book soon. It’s ok if it changes along the way, but I’m really interested to know what’s in store in forthcoming chapters. The stuff that just went up is nice and readable, but very elementary. I’ve been looking at Haskell materials on and off for the past year or so and I still don’t understand how to do anything except for the very trivial. So I have high hopes for this book, to bridge the large gap between the available elementary stuff, and the stuff used by Haskell programmers who actually know what they’re doing. One ambition that I have is to write some applications using HAppS, which is way beyond my understanding right now, if that helps.
I would be very interested in finding out more of the underlying software being used for the in-place comment system. It seems very powerful. Is it provided directly by the web page development software you are using, or something you have done on your own? I haven’t seen this done elsewhere, but it seems very nice.