Re: o'reilly zsh book?

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

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.