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This issue documents/elaborates on an IRC conversation I had the other day with @alabamenhu. (Er, ok two weeks ago…).

Here's the idea: as we go through the "collect" phase of collect-conserve-and-remaster, some group of rakoons pick out 15–30 blog posts that do a good job of telling the story of the Raku programming language. Then one or two of us write a brief introduction for each post, putting it in context and framing where Raku was as a language. My thought is that, when taken together, this essay collection could provide a good overview of the "spirit"/philosophy/culture of Raku.

As a model, I've been thinking of books like Coders at Work and The Best Software Writing, vol. 1 – that is, books that combine multiple viewpoints about a technical subject without themselves being hugely technical.

That last point is key to the project, at least as I'm imagining it. Despite the "Best of Raku" label I started this issue with, the goal would actually not be to select the best blog posts about Raku. Many excellent blog posts explain advanced usage topics and really ought to be read split-screen with a REPL. Those posts would gain nothing – and lose a lot – by being collected into a book. Conversely, less technical posts – the sort that could be read in bed without a laptop, or when traveling, or when the uninterrupted focus needed for coding just isn't an option – would gain a lot from being placed in context and read alongside similar essays offering a different perspective.

(To give you an idea of the sort of posts I'm imagining, think "State of the Onion")

In any event, the goal would be to collect the posts, write the connecting material, and turn it into both an EPUB and a physical book that we could self-publish. (That's a very breezy description, but the process I'm suggesting would be a lot of work, and I don't want to minimize that). My current thought is that we would freely distribute the ebook version and sell the print book at cost (though, in both cases, we'd be able to encourage readers to donate to Raku). Part of the reason I'm imagining not trying to profit from selling the book is that it just doesn't feel right in this situation: we're all in this together, after all. Also, the accounting would get significantly more complicated and we'd need to figure out how to divide profits with the various authors – much easier if there just aren't any profits.

(We would, of course, need to ensure that we only publish work when allowed to, either because the post was initially published under an open license, because the author agreed to the publication, or (ideally) both.)

As you can probably tell, this I have a lot of ideas in this area, but all of them are very fluid. I will be very interested to hear thoughts from other rakoons, especially those who have previous experience with publishing Raku books (@JJ?, @moritz? @ash? Others who are slipping my mind, I'm sure).