I made $40,000 this year with my eBook and you (probably) can, too
omgbloglol.com
omgbloglol.com
If, however, you are looking for a way to establish your name in a given community, gain consulting work, etc. then it may be a good idea.
Even then, I would begin with writing long-form blog posts about the topic as a lead-in to a larger book that you can sell.
I am always suspicious of authors who promote a book where I can't find any other content from the author anywhere online (or even any mention of their name).
I'd love to know it so I can use it to more easily mentally flag urls like this when I see them "oh it's another post-one-off-metapromotionalism website".
Of course, you can flag it if you want; you're entitled to be offended by my efforts. But trying to tag me as some sort of stupid huckster who's showing up just to make some cash is really quite ridiculous.
For what it's worth, I agree with him and I don't think I am the only one. Since it's business to communicate, you may want to look into that.
It's really grating, especially, when I see that attitude here on HN where I think most of us are all going for the same thing: making awesome stuff and hopefully getting paid to do it.
DUDE: Walter, you can't do that. These guys're like me, they're pacificists. Smokey was a conscientious objector.
WALTER: You know Dude, I myself dabbled with pacifism at one point. Not in Nam, of course--
DUDE: And you know Smokey has emotional problems!
WALTER: You mean--beyond pacifism?
DUDE: He's fragile, man! He's very fragile!
WALTER: Huh. I did not know that. Well, it's water under the bridge.
When you comment, remember, Smokey is here reading too, and he's fragile, man, he's very fragile.
The only place where I really see an anti commercial attitude is, strangely enough, with ebooks, perhaps because these are usually brought at relatively high prices compared to what books (non-fiction) are usually sold at and are, at those I have brought, promising heaven and earth in their pre-sell "call to action" pages and are almost always of uniform low quality consisting mostly of a what would have been an okay blog-post extended with a bunch of personal anecdotes from the author and some common info that I would already know if I was interested in the topic.
But mostly, I don't think there is anything wrong with capitalizing on your ability to write or your previous success, i just feel tricked when reading 'story of x' and i found an attached 'i will also teach you x for money' that i did not expect
I don't think there's any reason to cast doubts on my integrity.
In what way does PHP's standard library fall short that Python overcomes?
In what ways does PHP's standard library fall short of Python's? I was never comparing the two. I have always found that both could get the job done, except PHP's uses a very weak naming convention/has none at all.
I was comparing PHP's standard library features with those of Django. Here, Django wins hands down. If you are not familiar with either, I recommend trying reading through their tutorials and seeing which one comes out with a more complete product in which one feels less messy.
Lastly, implying that PHP's standard library is not a framework because it is not built in PHP ("A framework is an abstraction built up USING a programming language, like PHP.") is just plain wrong. If I decided to speed up Django by re-writing every line of its code in C and making it an extension to Python rather than a Python module, without breaking any function signatures, would Django cease being a web framework? What would it become then? What if instead of C I chose Visual Basic, or Common Lisp, or F#, or even PHP (assuming I found a decent way to compile it to a binary)? A framework is collection of code that abstracts certain functionality. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_framework for further information.
EDIT: I am not at all talking about PHP the language vs Python. The two are different and both have some very interesting features. PHP 5 has grown up to be a pretty interesting general purpose dynamic language. I am specifically talking about using PHP on the web.
Where you call pre-populated global variables "language constructs". They are not. PHP calls them "super globals". These are global variables mapped from the GET/POST/Cookie client headers into the server environment by the PHP SAPI, for instance the Apache SAPI. PHP has many SAPIs, including a command line one, which doesn't populate these globals for obvious reasons. Oh and FastCGI for PHP is provided by a SAPI as well (nothing to do with the standard library).
Oh and quickly - "I was comparing PHP's standard library features with those of Django." Can I pick a PHP framework of choice and start comparing it to Python?
So why PHP to Django? How would the Python crowd feel if it was the other way around, for instance: Python to Codeigniter.
Edit: I might add, at half the price I'd buy the advertised book in this article as presents for a couple of friends. I just don't have the language talent to write well myself.
PHP to Django sounds like an awesome idea. I'd say Django deployment best practices sounds more like a chapter in PHP to Django.
I forget who I learned this trick from :(
The product toted was usually a small pamphlet instructing you how to make surprising sums of money by writing a pamphlet instructing others how to make surprising sums of money by writing pamphlets.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose…