For the past few months I’ve been kicking around the idea of writing a book about SimplePie. This was recently fueled by the mentions of SimplePie in Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP as well as Cameron Moll’s recent thoughts on self-publishing. I’m comfortable working in QuarkXPress and InDesign, and I’ve been writing in some sort of fairly substantial capacity for several years now. Perhaps this is the next step to take?
So, I wanted to gauge the interest level of the SimplePie community — you. If we were to write a book, in English, and release it in either PDF or paperback form (likely both), is it something you’d buy? If so, what would you be willing to spend for it? I’ve long been frustrated at the $50 USD technical books because they’re priced above the “easy” price range where you can easily justify spending the money. Books like “Designing with Web Standards” and “Don’t Make Me Think!” went for $35 USD when they first came out, and although that’s better, it still feels a few dollars too high. Initially I’m thinking $25-$30 per paperback copy and $15-20ish for a PDF copy, but of course I’m throwing those numbers out having not attempted to self-publish a book yet. 
“Getting Real” by 37signals went for $17 USD for a PDF (if I remember correctly), so I think this price is in the right range.
My first thoughts for chapters would include:
- A history of RSS and Atom, including what it is, politics, etc.
- The story of the SimplePie project, how the developers met and started working together
- Fundamental PHP basics that you need to understand to use SimplePie
- Getting SimplePie set up and installed in a few different environments
- Using SimplePie, basics
- More advanced usages of SimplePie
- Writing your own plugins for third-party software
- Writing your own SimplePie Add-ons, extending and overriding SimplePie classes
- The new SimplePie Live! (which should definitely be 1.0 by then)
Again, that’s a first pass. I’m interested in finding out what YOU would be interested in learning from such a book. What topics should we delve into? What chapters would be good to have? What kinds of things would you like to know, or have in a book? What do you think about book prices? Too high/low? This book is for YOU and (hopefully) many, many others, so we need your feedback to know what kind of book to write — or if we should even go down such a path. If we wanted to go with a publisher, who do you think would be good to go with?
Comment by Adrian on 28 Sep 2007 at 2:02 pm
Sounds awesome, I’d be first in line to buy a copy. In the past month or so, I’ve been a first time user of SimplePie and incredibly happy with the overall effectiveness and ease of the tool. Modifying its uses, however, and trying to adapt it to my particular application has been a long journey, more so because of my lack of PHP knowledge and is not necessarily SimplePie’s fault. That being said, I’d love to have a resource (like a book) to reference and find help with using SP, everything from the basics to advanced. For price, my suggestion would be stick around $15 for the PDF version. Cameron’s Mobile Web Book went for $19 but it was based on more of a broad topic that will be used by more people, whereas SP is a little more focused to one specific crowd. I hope you do go through with this and I wish you the best of luck.
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