D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 23 December 2015 at 12:54:39 UTC, Jakob Jenkov 
wrote:
>> I really want to put these paid blogging ideas into use one 
>> day, but maybe D isn't the place to do it.
>
> Or - maybe D is exactly the right use case. D doesn't already 
> have a ton of available material, but still as a decent size 
> community.

Yes, D could always use more material, other than the books 
available now.  Whether it's done through my paid blogging ideas 
or not will depend on how many D devs decide they'd like to try 
writing for such a paid blog.

> I'd say the hardest part is to get information about those 
> parts of D which are not documented. I find the D docs for 
> Phobos pretty hard to read. There are very few explanations to 
> the methods and classes.
>
> The "read the code" dogma is not very helpful to beginners in a 
> new language or API.

I recommend Andrei and Ali's books for the language itself, 
though they don't go much into phobos (still reading the free 
chapter on ranges from Mike's book and have not read most of 
Adam's book yet).

On Wednesday, 23 December 2015 at 15:28:34 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> On Wednesday, 23 December 2015 at 03:05:46 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> I've been thinking about contacting various D devs to see how 
>> much interest there is- I mentioned that I contacted one guy 
>> already- but I wasn't sure if I myself wanted to put time into 
>> this.  I really want to put these paid blogging ideas into use 
>> one day, but maybe D isn't the place to do it.
>
> I don't think it would be worth your time to focus on D in 
> general. If you want someone to pay more than a couple dollars 
> a year, you need to offer something specific, and it needs to 
> offer a direct, immediate career benefit. Web development with 
> D might work if done right. Probably the better thing is to go 
> into it with a low price and a goal of learning. Then you can 
> move on to a more profitable market.

I was thinking of focusing on more advanced usage of D, ie the 
new idioms that D makes available with its specific constructs 
and libraries, maybe supplemented with posts for intermediate 
users.  I don't think there's such a book now, as they 
understandably focus on new or inexperienced users.

I don't think D can offer a "direct, immediate career benefit," 
as you can't use D in most workplaces.  I'm skeptical that D will 
ever do well in web development, as no AoT-compiled language 
garners much share (maybe Go has gotten a little recently).  
Rather, the goal would be a site for hobbyists to learn how to 
use the language to its fullest, without having to dive into the 
source and github PRs to extract all that info themselves.  
Obviously, learning D might indirectly benefit someone in their 
career, by learning new concepts from D that other languages 
don't employ, but that's not direct or immediate.

The prices would be low- I mentioned a $5-10 paid balance- but 
more importantly pay as you use, ie metered.  So if someone found 
a lot of use, it would be possible for them to spend $50 or more 
in a year.  Someone else might just read an article or two 
occasionally, and only end up using $1-2 from their balance.  I 
believe such metered models are the endgame online, crazy to me 
that almost nobody is doing it yet, decades after it's been 
possible.