PerlDancer Book

This is the repository of the official PerlDancer Book.

Target

PerlDancer is an open-source project that lets you write easily powerful web applications.

It has been created in 2009 and is now a full-featured mature and dynamic project, developed by a striving community of passionate developers.

The core team has started writing a book about PerlDancer, in order to offer its community of users a great documentation material, as a printed copies.

This repository holds the contents of the book, our goal is to publish it in electronic formats and as printed copy.

Fundraising

To finance the costs of publishing many printed-copies of the book (we aim at a first run of 500 copies) we started a Kickstarter campaign.

We have 30 days to raise 15,000 euros. We estimated this to be enough to cover the production of 500 copies and sending them to their owners with appropriate shipping costs.

We'll also use some of the money to "buy time" to the authors, when needed (as all of us are working on this project during our free-time).

Table of contents

This is a first draft of the Table of Contents of the book. Of course it will change, but it gives a good idea of the book's expected content.

The order of the chapters might change, that's why we don't number them here.

• Preface
  • Origins
  • A DSL for Web Development
  • Credits
• Introduction
  • How this book was written
  • How to read this book
  • "Ballet", a real-life application
• Chapter X - Bootstraping the application, very first steps
  • In this chapter, we create an app from scracth and make it display our homepage
• Chapter X - TODO Session
• Chapter X - TODO Serializers
• Chapter X - TODO Database
• Chapter X - TODO Configuration
• Chapter X - TODO Logging
• Chapter X - TODO Authentication
• Chapter X - Deploying the app, going to production
• Postface - PerlDancer A brief history of code
  • The genesis, how Dancer was born
  • The community behind the project, how to contribute

Building this book

To build the chapters:

./build/tools/build_chapters.pl

This will replace all L tokens by sections/XXX.pod or examples/XXX.pl

To run the examples: ./build/tools/run.pl examples/XXX.pl

TODO :

• Find a way to build a complete PDF with a table of contents and an index at the end of the book.

• Footnotes are not rendered nicely in HTML, if possible, find a way to render them as real footnotes, like in Wikipedia for instance.