Re: o'reilly zsh book?

[Bruce Stephens <b.stephens@isode.com>]

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.