I need some advice about the book

time to read 2 min | 344 words

I have got the final reviews about the book (Building Domain Specific Languages with Boo), and a few of them talk about a problem in the book that I am not sure how to solve.

The problem is, quite simply, the book talks about Boo a lot. I see the book not as a academic topic, but as something that would give the reader actionable knowledge. At the same time, I try to cover the entire life cycle of a DSL. So the book covers things like how to design a good syntax, documenting DSLs, how to structure them, versioning issues and other aspects that are mostly agnostic to the actual tool that we use to build the DSL.

On the other hand, things like integrating with a unit testing framework, or building UI, or the exact particulars about how to build certain aspects of the DSL and common recipes for frequent problems are strongly tied to the actual technology that we are using. Oh, we can probably discuss some of them in abstract, but I don’t think it would be nearly as valuable.

One of the goals that I have when writing this book is to create an actionable document, one that you can use to start working on a DSL right away. There are several DSLs out there that I can directly trace to the book (Simple State Machine and Horn), so I think that I did a good job there.

The problem, as reflected in the reviews, that people expected to see much more about DSLs and maybe get some brief discussion about the actual implementation in Boo.

I think that the main issue is different expectations that they had, and I am wondering what we can do about it. One of the options that we consider is to rename the book to reflect what it actually contain better. However, I don’t know what name would suit it better, and I don’t even know if that is the best solutions.

Can you offer some suggestions?