[Slight OT] TDPL in Russia

[Andrej Mitrovic]

> Having a decent commercial book discourages projects like http://
> en.wikibooks.org/wiki/A_Beginner's_Guide_to_D

Having a book like TDPL encourages adoption and will eventually spawn
user-made tutorials and free books (because people will have knowledge
of the language by learning from TDPL). You can't write a good free
book about a language unless you understand it well, and before TDPL
you had to keep track of the newsgroups for any language changes and
you had to try to figure out D on your own (I'm referring to D2).

Honestly, I find the wikibooks approach rather silly. Someone starts a
project, then leaves, and expects someone else to just jump in and
continue writing. That's no good. You either commit to your project,
or if you're solo and can't finish it on your own then you enlist the
help of others. But you need to keep everyone informed of the
progress. And you need some kind of plan/schedule. I've found this
after a bit of googling:

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/announce/3412.html
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/41861.html

So someone comes up with an idea, others think it's a good idea, a few
commits here and there and it all stagnates from there on. It becomes
a random bunch of code snippets each written in different style and
some of the code probably broken (e.g. that case of writefln vs
writeln some weeks ago that popped up in the NG). I don't find
wikibooks a good learning place at all. But maybe that's just my
experience from the few books I've tried reading there.

On the other hand, a book like Pilgrim's Dive Into Python 3 is an
excellent example of a free book. But the author took the time to plan
and write it, he was really committed to his project (unlike these NG
posts like "hey lets do this!" "yeah, lets do it!" "zzz").