On Mar 26, 2014, at 9:32 AM, Simon Spero wrote:

> I would structure the book by task, showing how different languages would
> implement the same task.
> 
> For example,
> 
> using a marc parsing library in java, groovy, python, ruby, perl,
> c/c++/objective c, Haskell.
> 
> Implementing same.
> 
> Using a rest API
> 
> Implementing a rest API
> 
> Doing statistical analysis of catalog records, circulation data , etc.
> 
> Doing knowledge based analysis of same
> --
> Treatment of each topic and language is likely to be cursory at best, and I
> am not sure who the audience would be.
> 
> A series of  "<language> for librarians" books would seem more useful and
> easier to produce.


If you tried to put it all into a book, you'd have two issues:

	1. It'd be horribly long.  (anyone remember the 'Encyclopedia
	   of Graphical File Formats'?)

	2. Tools change over time, and books don't.

... so instead, perhaps the code4lib community would want to try to
put some of these together on the code4lib wiki.  Eg, for the Marc one:

	http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/Working_with_MARC

... people could contribute recipes of how they use the various
libraries that are linked in.  (or just say, look it's outdated, we
listed it, but we recommend (x) instead).

Think of it like a code golf challenge -- someone throws out a
problem, and members of the community (if they have the time)
submit their various solutions in different languages or using
different libraries.


... another possibility would be to organize something over
on stackexchange ... if you set some 'scoring criteria', we could
run them as 'code-challenges' on the codegolf site:

	http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/code-challenge

-Joe