Re: o'reilly zsh book?

Re: o'reilly zsh book?

[Peter Stephenson]

Sweth Chandramouli wrote:
> so i guess my questions are, would anyone else who is more involved
> in the development side (and thus has a better understanding of the
> internals) be interested in co-writing an o'reilly zsh book, and would the
> list as a whole be opposed to being a sounding board for any questions
> that might come up?

I'd possibly be interested, too.  I would say you'd have to start
putting it together on the basis of 3.0, particularly since there
isn't an active archive manager at the moment, and add bits if there's
ever a stable release of 3.1 (I don't know what Zefram's criteria are,
since as far as I know 3.1 is about as stable as 3.0 --- more so
without the extra patches --- on the common ground).

I don't know about the audience, except that hardly any physicists are
going to buy it.  However, at IfH where I was working before --- they
have a quite large computer centre --- it's a standard shell, so there
must be a definite, if hidden, potential audience, given that there's
currently nothing beyond the documentation, unlike Emacs, where there
are already several books and more readable online documentation.  On
the other hand, a book shouldn't be an excuse for bad documentation.

As for contents, my starting point would be to include things like
  1. Setting up; .zshrc, .zshenv etc.; converting from other shells;
     picking your options (in some detail, I would think, since
     this is a key point), emulate etc.; getting the history the way
     you want it; defining a prompt; mail messages.
  2. Basic syntax issues, with pointers to other reference works for
     more detail, enough to write more complex .-files; variables and
     arrays and useful builtins; functions (bearing in mind it isn't
     going to be a programming tract).  Discourage too much use of the
     variant syntaxes.
  3. Basic command line editing, vi/emacs modes, bindkey, multi-line
     issues; vared and print -z $(...) and tips about niceties like
     the buffer stack.
  4. Expansions, including globbing and parameters, and some
     reasonably painless guide to the order this all happens in
     and how to modify it via things like eval and globsubst.
  5. Maybe room somewhere for a ragbag of tips, like the things
     included in the FAQ, e.g. use of chpwd, multios, disown, all
     those things people tell you about and then you forget.
  6. Completion (compctl style).  I put it down here since you can't
     avoid using everything else to get it working properly.
--- and then when 3.1 comes along, you can think about adding stuff on
the modules, new style completion, associative arrays, and so on.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@ibmth.df.unipi.it>       Tel: +39 050 844536
WWW:  http://www.ifh.de/~pws/
Dipartimento di Fisica, Via Buonarroti 2, 56127 Pisa, Italy

Re: o'reilly zsh book?

[Karsten Thygesen]

>>>>> "Sweth" == Sweth Chandramouli <sweth@astaroth.nit.gwu.edu> writes:

Sweth> 	that would probably be the hardest selling point.  now that
Sweth> zsh is being included in most of the linux distributions, we
Sweth> can't even do something like try to get a count of total number
Sweth> of downloads from all of the mirror sites.  does anyone know
Sweth> how other free software packages get estimates of their user
Sweth> base?  (for that matter, how many people are on the zsh lists?
Sweth> i think we could assume that anyone on one of the lists is a
Sweth> user.)

There is around 700 members of the zsh mailing lists. A few of them is
gateways to sublists, but the number is quite accurate.

Karsten

Re: o'reilly zsh book?

[Bruce Stephens]

Duncan Sinclair <sinclair@dis.strath.ac.uk> writes:

> Or "A Dummy's Nutshell Guide to Zsh on Linux Unleashed, Revealed for
> Idiots".

"In 24 hours".

Re: o'reilly zsh book?

[Duncan Sinclair]

Hi,

>> There's a potential problem of market: does anyone have any idea how
>> many people use zsh?  I'd buy an O'Reilly book on it.

A good marketing strategy:  Call the book "Zsh on Linux".  ;-)

Or "A Dummy's Nutshell Guide to Zsh on Linux Unleashed, Revealed for Idiots".

There's bound to be a market for that, surely?

More seriously, how about in the next release, in the install notes,
ask people to e-mail some mail-box, so we can gauge usage?

Cheers,



Duncan.

Re: o'reilly zsh book?

[Chavdar Ivanov]

On Tue, 26 Jan 1999, Oliver Kiddle wrote:

...

> > Unices, who can tell?
> 
> I've never seen zsh bundled with any UNIX other than Linux. In my
> experience most people stick with whatever they are given, which I think
> is ksh on most unices.

The freeware CD which ships with Irix 6.5 contains proper inst
distribution of zsh 3.0.5; not the latest stuff, but good enough for me
not to bother compiling it there. 

I myself have been installing zsh on all the Unix boxes we ship for the
last, I don't know, may be three years; recently I started doing the same
on NT ( together with the Cygnus B20 ) - almost livable...  

> 


----------------------------------------------------------------
Chavdar Ivanov           | Talbot Way, Small Heath Business Park
Delcam UK Limited        | Birmingham B10 0HJ, United Kingdom
Customer Support Dept.   | (+44)121-6831014
----------------------------------------------------------------
*Four hours* to bury a cat? Yes - it wouldn't keep still
----------------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, January 26, 1999
ci@DelcamDOTcom, ci@SPidersWebDOTcoDOTuk 
ci4@NetscapeDOTnet (yes, there is a 4) 

Re: o'reilly zsh book?

[Thomas Koehler]

On Tue, Jan 26, 1999 at 10:26:31AM +0000, Bruce Stephens wrote:
[snip]
> On the other hand, it would be strange to have a zsh cookbook without
> something describing the basics of it.  Maybe that could be compressed
> a bit, so you'd say that zsh is basically like ksh, and then summarise
> the extra globbing or whatever when you give examples of it (with an
> index or a table somewhere pointing at where these references are).
> I'm not sure how practical that would be, though: the existing concise
> documentation is pretty long.

It would be nice if there was a chapter about differences between zsh
and bash (bash is similar to zsh, but doesn't share zsh's coolest
features), and perhaps a chapter how zsh differs from tcsh (this would
be rather much, I think).

CU,
Thomas

-- 
    Thomas Köhler    Email:     jean-luc@picard.franken.de
        <><           WWW:    http://home.pages.de/~jeanluc/
                      IRC:               jeanluc
      LCARS --- Linux for Computers on All Real Starships

Re: o'reilly zsh book?

[Bruce Stephens]

Sweth Chandramouli <sweth@astaroth.nit.gwu.edu> writes:

> all of the basic documentation is really already there, although
> often in very cryptic langauge; even so, as you pointed out earlier,
> what is really needed is good tutorial info.  part and parcel with
> good examples and tutorials, however, is having a way for someone
> who wants to do something to easily find it, and that's where i
> think that having the docs done professionally would be of greatest
> use: making a really good index.  i'd guess that, all told, about a
> third of the time spent making a really useful set of documentation
> on zsh would involve just building a good index and
> cross-referencing everything; a commercial publisher would be far
> far better at doing something like that than, say, i would.

Sure.  And having the whole lot nicely bound in a book is worthwhile.
Then I can read it on the bus, or something.  (Whenever I read the zsh
documentation, I find half a dozen things I never knew existed, and
generally a couple of things that I actually want to use.)

> the money isn't much of an issue anyway;

Well, no.  I was half-joking.  I'd be a little surprised if anybody
agreed to publish the book, to be honest.

Re: o'reilly zsh book?

[Bruce Stephens]

Sweth Chandramouli <sweth@astaroth.nit.gwu.edu> writes:

> actually, now that i think about it, maybe what i'm thinking about
> is less like "learning ksh", and more like the perl cookbook that
> gnat and tom just put out--as much a "shell scripting for power
> users" as an intro to zsh, though it would, in the process of
> showing all of the cool shell tricks, provide a good description of
> zsh qua zsh as well.

I think that's probably what I'd like to see.  Lots of examples
showing how to do things: how to go about programmable completion, for
example (using the new syntax, when it's stable, because it looks much
nicer).  I'm thinking mostly about interactive use, since that's what
I use zsh for, so I'd want examples of common glob patterns (and
qualifiers), and handy history modifications that I'm likely to use
interactively.

On the other hand, it would be strange to have a zsh cookbook without
something describing the basics of it.  Maybe that could be compressed
a bit, so you'd say that zsh is basically like ksh, and then summarise
the extra globbing or whatever when you give examples of it (with an
index or a table somewhere pointing at where these references are).
I'm not sure how practical that would be, though: the existing concise
documentation is pretty long.

Re: o'reilly zsh book?

[Timothy Writer]

opk@thoth.u-net.com (Oliver Kiddle) writes:

> I've never seen zsh bundled with any UNIX other than Linux. In my
> experience most people stick with whatever they are given, which I think
> is ksh on most unices.

Me neither.  But Sun did modify their /usr/dt/Xsession to be zsh aware.  At
least they know it exists.

-- 
Tim Writer                                              tim@starnix.com
Starnix Inc.
Brampton, Ontario, CANADA

o'reilly zsh book?

[Oliver Kiddle]

On Jan 25,  5:06pm, Bruce Stephens wrote:

> There's a potential problem of market: does anyone have any idea how
> many people use zsh?  I'd buy an O'Reilly book on it.

I may be wrong but I suspect that there isn't a vast number and most
wouldn't buy a book.

> Alternatively, you could help to improve the documentation that comes
> with zsh.  That would have the disadvantages that you wouldn't get any
> money from it, and there wouldn't be a nice printed version (which
> would be nice).  But even if O'Reilly (or whoever) turned down your
> proposal, you could still contribute to the free documentation.

The current documentation is a reference and I would be against
augmenting it with lots of examples and tutorials. Certainly time could
be well spent in updating it for any of the new or undocumented
features.

When I first switched to zsh from tcsh, I read a document titled "An
introduction to the Z shell" by Paul Falstad and Bas de Bakker. It
provided quite a good introductory tutorial while also giving me a taste
for what I was missing out on by using tcsh. It might be a good idea to
write a number of smallish free tutorials. They could each be targeted
at different audiences. For example, there could be a guide for bash
users, a guide for tcsh users, completion tutorial, zle tutorial,
advanced zsh scripting etc.

> "Linux Programming Tools" has a chapter on zsh, but it's horribly
> limited.  It doesn't even mention things like $(...), which also exist

One possibility would be to contact the author of another O'Reilly book
about adding a significant chapter about zsh in the next edition. The
advantage would be that the market for the book wouldn't be limited to
current zsh users and it might persuade some new users to give zsh a
try. The trouble would be that it couldn't be as detailed.

On Jan 25, 12:52pm, Sweth Chandramouli wrote:

> 	all of the basic documentation is really already there, although
> often in very cryptic langauge; even so, as you pointed out earlier, what 
> is really needed is good tutorial info.  part and parcel with good examples
> and tutorials, however, is having a way for someone who wants to do something
> to easily find it, and that's where i think that having the docs done
> professionally would be of greatest use: making a really good index.  i'd

For examples rather than tutorials, it might be a good idea to set up an
archive of a example shell scripts, completions and zle widgets on the
web site. A well designed web page is a lot easier to navigate than
printed pages, however well indexed.

On Jan 25,  5:58pm, Bruce Stephens wrote:

> No.  I suspect most Linux distributions ship with zsh.  It's on the
> 1-CD RedHat, for example.  But typically the default for new users is
> bash, so presumably most people will end up using bash.  Of other
> Unices, who can tell?

I've never seen zsh bundled with any UNIX other than Linux. In my
experience most people stick with whatever they are given, which I think
is ksh on most unices.

Anyway, I'd be happy to help with writing sections of a book or short
tutorials or whatever but, similarly to Sweth, I'm "far from the most
knowledgeable person about zsh".

Oliver Kiddle

Re: o'reilly zsh book?

[Sweth Chandramouli]

On Mon, Jan 25, 1999 at 09:32:22AM -0800, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> The main reason I've been dragging my feet about making a proposal is that
> I can't decide what really ought to be in the book.  Basic shell usage and
> the important aspects of scripting are already covered in agonizing detail
> by ORA's bash and ksh books; aside from a few oddities like "emulate", it
> just isn't that much different to do those things in zsh.  (Intentionally
> similar, in fact.)
> 
> So the book would have to be largely about the interactive zsh experience,
> and would have to progress pretty quickly into the real esoterica.  That'd
> certainly be fun to write, but isn't the kind of thing that sells to a big
> audience; even Bob's emacs book isn't doing spectacular business, and there
> are a lot more emacs users than zsh users.
	i can see lots of space in between what's discussed in the ksh book
(don't have the bash book, but the one time i paged through it, it seemed
mostly the same) and a book of pure esoterica.  i've spent the last month
or so, for example, writing ksh scripts to do all sorts of neat post-install
tasks on a bunch of sun machines i'm going to be bringing up soon, and the
entire time, i was thinking to myself that it would have been so much easier
and prettier to write them in zsh.  (since one of the last ones to run was
to install zsh, however, that was not very feasible.)  examples of how to
do things like that would, i think, be the bread-and-butter of a book on
zsh--like bruce suggested, what zsh needs is more examples of things that
your average "power" user (if that isn't an oxymoron) might want to do,
if only they knew that it were possible.
	another way of looking at it is how i often explain why i use zsh:
zsh is to ksh what perl is to sed/awk--in many ways, the same thing, but
with so many new features and additions that at times you wonder if there
really is any connection between the two.  even though the sed/awk book
and ora's mastering regexp books cover much of the "core" functionality
of perl, there's so much else out there that there's now five perl books
from ora alone.
	actually, now that i think about it, maybe what i'm thinking about
is less like "learning ksh", and more like the perl cookbook that gnat and
tom just put out--as much a "shell scripting for power users" as an intro
to zsh, though it would, in the process of showing all of the cool shell
tricks, provide a good description of zsh qua zsh as well.

> An additional detail is that 3.1.x is a fast-moving target at the moment.
> Several major new features have appeared since roughly early November, and
> are still mutating towards their final form.  Until things stabalize a bit
> again, a book about zsh esoterica would practically be obsolete before it
> was even finished.
	this was another concern that i had, especially given the apparent
paradigm of "ksh-compatibility over backawrds compat with earlier versions
of zsh".  still, i think that by the time a book were to really get under
way, things might have settled down some, or at least a better idea of
that "final form" might be available.

> Nevertheless, it could be a worthwhile thing to talk about.  Bob's offered
> to help me put the proposal together if I work out the details.  Anybody
> have any ideas how we might estimate the size of the audience?
	in light of the recent tcp_wrappers trojan, i suggest an undocumented 
block of code that stores the output of uname -a and whoami, and mails
a digest copy to the dev list once a month.  :)

	-- sweth.

-- 
Sweth Chandramouli
IS Coordinator, The George Washington University
<sweth@gwu.edu> / (202) 994 - 8521 (V) / (202) 994 - 0458 (F)
<a href="http://astaroth.nit.gwu.edu/~sweth/disc.html">*</a>

Re: o'reilly zsh book?

[Matt Armstrong]

Bruce Stephens <b.stephens@isode.com> writes:

> There's a potential problem of market: does anyone have any idea how
> many people use zsh?  I'd buy an O'Reilly book on it.

My guess would be a lot fewer than bash or tcsh.  Both bash or tcsh
are far more likely to be people's default shells.

In my company of 120 people or so, I'm the only one who uses zsh.  And
that was pretty much by accident.  I couldn't figure out how to get
bash to do what zsh does when you:

setopt AutoList
setopt AutoMenu
setopt ListTypes
setopt ListAmbiguous

so I went looking for another shell.

Re: o'reilly zsh book?

[Bruce Stephens]

"Bart Schaefer" <schaefer@brasslantern.com> writes:

> An additional detail is that 3.1.x is a fast-moving target at the
> moment.  Several major new features have appeared since roughly
> early November, and are still mutating towards their final form.

Yes, and they're pretty crucial areas, too.  (For those that aren't on
zsh-workers: associative arrays, new syntax for programmable
completion, new glob qualifiers for sorting expansions.  Probably
other stuff I've forgotten.  All cool stuff which, once it's
stabilised, will be very nice, and exactly the kind of thing that
you'd want to be in a book.)

> Nevertheless, it could be a worthwhile thing to talk about.  Bob's
> offered to help me put the proposal together if I work out the
> details.  Anybody have any ideas how we might estimate the size of
> the audience?

No.  I suspect most Linux distributions ship with zsh.  It's on the
1-CD RedHat, for example.  But typically the default for new users is
bash, so presumably most people will end up using bash.  Of other
Unices, who can tell?

Re: o'reilly zsh book?

[Sweth Chandramouli]

On Mon, Jan 25, 1999 at 05:06:18PM +0000, Bruce Stephens wrote:
> > i've been thinking for a while that what zsh really needs is one of
> > those o'reilly handbooks to be written about it, and more recently,
> > i've come to the conclusion that that probably isn't going to happen
> > anytime soon.
> 
> There's a potential problem of market: does anyone have any idea how
> many people use zsh?  I'd buy an O'Reilly book on it.
	that would probably be the hardest selling point.  now that
zsh is being included in most of the linux distributions, we can't
even do something like try to get a count of total number of downloads
from all of the mirror sites.  does anyone know how other free software
packages get estimates of their user base?  (for that matter, how many
people are on the zsh lists?  i think we could assume that anyone on
one of the lists is a user.)

> Alternatively, you could help to improve the documentation that comes
> with zsh.  That would have the disadvantages that you wouldn't get any
> money from it, and there wouldn't be a nice printed version (which
> would be nice).  But even if O'Reilly (or whoever) turned down your
> proposal, you could still contribute to the free documentation.
	all of the basic documentation is really already there, although
often in very cryptic langauge; even so, as you pointed out earlier, what 
is really needed is good tutorial info.  part and parcel with good examples
and tutorials, however, is having a way for someone who wants to do something
to easily find it, and that's where i think that having the docs done
professionally would be of greatest use: making a really good index.  i'd
guess that, all told, about a third of the time spent making a really useful
set of documentation on zsh would involve just building a good index and
cross-referencing everything; a commercial publisher would be far far better
at doing something like that than, say, i would.
	the money isn't much of an issue anyway; the last book i co-authored
(sams.net's intranets unleashed, which i can heartily recommend you not
waste your money on) was done for free as a favour to my then-employer
(who promptly got into a lawsuit with the company who had subcontracted
them to help write the book, so that, of the 6 chapters i wrote, none showed
up in the final product, while i was given credit for co-authoring a
chapter that i had never even seen).  for zsh, at least, it would be more a
labour of love, or maybe just a labour of lust--i know that i'm just barely
scratching the surface of things that zsh can do for me, and having to
sit down and write it all up and come up with nifty examples would force
me to dig a lot deeper and actually learn everything i want to learn but
keep putting off until next week.
	if there's no book, of course, i would still help out with the docs,
but as i just mentioned, i have a huge tendency to put things off unless
there are deadlines to be met, which would (for me, at least) be another
advantage of doing the docs for a book, rather than "for fun".

	-- sweth.

-- 
Sweth Chandramouli
IS Coordinator, The George Washington University
<sweth@gwu.edu> / (202) 994 - 8521 (V) / (202) 994 - 0458 (F)
<a href="http://astaroth.nit.gwu.edu/~sweth/disc.html">*</a>

Re: o'reilly zsh book?

[Bart Schaefer]

On Jan 25, 11:48am, Sweth Chandramouli wrote:
> Subject: o'reilly zsh book?
> so i guess my questions are, would anyone else who is more involved
> in the development side (and thus has a better understanding of the
> internals) be interested in co-writing an o'reilly zsh book, and would the
> list as a whole be opposed to being a sounding board for any questions
> that might come up?  

I've actually been considering the idea.  (I work with Bob Glickstein, who
wrote ORA's "Writing GNU Emacs Extensions" book, and back in the days when
I worked with Dan Heller (author of Volume 6 of the X11 series) I even had
lunch with Tim to discuss book possibilities.  You can almost see Petaluma
from my office.)

The main reason I've been dragging my feet about making a proposal is that
I can't decide what really ought to be in the book.  Basic shell usage and
the important aspects of scripting are already covered in agonizing detail
by ORA's bash and ksh books; aside from a few oddities like "emulate", it
just isn't that much different to do those things in zsh.  (Intentionally
similar, in fact.)

So the book would have to be largely about the interactive zsh experience,
and would have to progress pretty quickly into the real esoterica.  That'd
certainly be fun to write, but isn't the kind of thing that sells to a big
audience; even Bob's emacs book isn't doing spectacular business, and there
are a lot more emacs users than zsh users.

An additional detail is that 3.1.x is a fast-moving target at the moment.
Several major new features have appeared since roughly early November, and
are still mutating towards their final form.  Until things stabalize a bit
again, a book about zsh esoterica would practically be obsolete before it
was even finished.

Nevertheless, it could be a worthwhile thing to talk about.  Bob's offered
to help me put the proposal together if I work out the details.  Anybody
have any ideas how we might estimate the size of the audience?

Re: o'reilly zsh book?

[Bruce Stephens]

Sweth Chandramouli <sweth@astaroth.nit.gwu.edu> writes:

> as always, i find myself amazed at what zsh can do, and totally
> frustrated at the documentation.

I'd like to see more tutorial-style documentation.  Not just reference
material, but something showing me how to use zsh for things I'm
likely to want to do.  

(Aside: one thing that really annoys me is computing magazines
comparing Unix command lines to DOS.  The DOS command line is crud,
but that doesn't imply that all command lines are crud.  But if you
come to bash or zsh from DOS, then probably you wouldn't see anything
other than an irritatingly case-sensitive DOS, simply because you
wouldn't know what to do with all the extra stuff.)

> i've been thinking for a while that what zsh really needs is one of
> those o'reilly handbooks to be written about it, and more recently,
> i've come to the conclusion that that probably isn't going to happen
> anytime soon.

There's a potential problem of market: does anyone have any idea how
many people use zsh?  I'd buy an O'Reilly book on it.

> and would the list as a whole be opposed to being a sounding board
> for any questions that might come up?

I don't see a problem in that.

Alternatively, you could help to improve the documentation that comes
with zsh.  That would have the disadvantages that you wouldn't get any
money from it, and there wouldn't be a nice printed version (which
would be nice).  But even if O'Reilly (or whoever) turned down your
proposal, you could still contribute to the free documentation.

"Linux Programming Tools" has a chapter on zsh, but it's horribly
limited.  It doesn't even mention things like $(...), which also exist
in bash.  It's not a bad book, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it
as anything other than an imperfect reference book.  The Tcl/Tk tables
use an invalid syntax, too.

o'reilly zsh book?

[Sweth Chandramouli]

On Mon, Jan 25, 1999 at 05:15:13PM +0100, Peter Stephenson wrote:
> I just confirmed this with the sources.  Something else I never knew.
	nor i, until someone asked if it could be done and i went looking.
as always, i find myself amazed at what zsh can do, and totally frustrated
at the documentation.  i've been thinking for a while that what zsh really
needs is one of those o'reilly handbooks to be written about it, and more
recently, i've come to the conclusion that that probably isn't going to
happen anytime soon.  except...
	i've written some tech. docs myself, and done a fair amount of
non-tech writing, and for the last week or two have been bouncing arouund
the idea of submitting a proposal for a zsh book to o'reilly; the main
problem i see with my doing that, however, is that i'm far from the most
knowledgeable person about zsh, so most of my zsh tricks come from this
list.  so i guess my questions are, would anyone else who is more involved
in the development side (and thus has a better understanding of the
internals) be interested in co-writing an o'reilly zsh book, and would the
list as a whole be opposed to being a sounding board for any questions
that might come up?  

	-- sweth.

-- 
Sweth Chandramouli
IS Coordinator, The George Washington University
<sweth@gwu.edu> / (202) 994 - 8521 (V) / (202) 994 - 0458 (F)
<a href="http://astaroth.nit.gwu.edu/~sweth/disc.html">*</a>