Why a separate page for each book

Purpose: discussion about the Where can I find a book about Tcl page.

LV: Should I break this page into a lot of smaller pages, one per book?

JC: I think that might work well. One could prefix each page title with "BOOK:" for example, and have all books show up with a single search (sorted on last change date). Might be real easy to access, especially in local mode. 'Nother advantage: each book will have its own URL. Either that, or a separator line between each entry, would be my vote on this...

LV: Turns out, you can not use BOOK: since Wikit right now trys to treat it as a URL type , fails, and so doesn't do anything with the link. I am working around this for the moment.

AK: I would certainly allow to group a book and its reviews together. And with the new search facility even a non-existing short list would be no trouble, as we are able to generate it on-the-fly. We need conventions for the title, though, to make the latter work.

JC: How about removing and from these entries? And how about removing mailto and personal info, and creating the proper personal pages so that a simple "[John Ousterhout]" reference leads to this information? It saves work when an email address changes. We could take this further: instead of lots of references to the http://www.scriptics.com site, one could set up a Scriptics page, and then use "[Scriptics]" instead. This would be kind of deepening the hyperlinks, so to speak.

LV: Yikes! Another bug! Wikit ate the left and right angle brackets that JC put in!

AK: I see no point for '<URL:' and '>' either. And yes, having these personal pages would be a bonus. It's like the early databases, a network of references. Add in publishers, etc. too.

AK: Another point in favor of separate book pages. We are able to link back to them from the pages describing individuals. See Tcl'ers.

JC: Yikes indeed, my "<URL:" and ">" text got deleted, probably on the subsequent edit. I'll look into that.

JC: I propose to use "Book:" as prefix *later*, and "BOOK" for now to get around a WiKit limitation. The reasons for that particular capitalization will become clear when How to link to a page will be described. Soon. Meta comment: I find it quite helpful to be able to announce intentions by mentioning it as a new page.


LV: Another BOOK issue - when adding review information, it might be better if at the very least you tag the review with your initials. If you are the author, perhaps mark your remarks as author's notes.