Some of you might remember the lightning talk I gave at the London Perl Workshop last year (it’s available on YouTube, I’ll wait if you want to watch it). In it, I said I planned to resurrect the Perl School brand, using it to publish Perl ebooks. One book, Perl Taster, was already available and I had plans to write and publish several more. Those plans are still ongoing…

Also in the talk, I asked if anyone else wanted to write a book for the series. I offered to help out with the hard parts of getting your text into the Amazon system (it’s actually nowhere near as hard as you might think). Three people approached me later to discuss the possibility of writing something, but only one followed through with something more concrete. That was John Davies, who has been a regular attendee at London Perl Mongers for a pretty long time. At the LPW, John had helped Martin Berends to run a training course on using Selenium with Perl. As part of that help, John had written some notes on the course which had been distributed to the attendees. John wondered if those notes would be worth publishing as a Perl School ebook. I said that it was certainly worth pursuing the idea.

Over the last few months, John has expanded his original notes considerably and I’ve been doing the work needed to convert his input into an ebook. And I’m happy to say that the book was published on Amazon yesterday. It’s called Selenium and Perl and you should be able to find it on your local Kindle store. If you want to test your Perl web applications using Selenium, then I hope that you find it useful.

It’s been the first time I’ve edited someone else’s work and converted it into an ebook. I think the process has gone well (perhaps someone should ask John for his opinion!)

But I’m confident enough of the process to renew the offer I made at the LPW. If you’re interested in writing an ebook as part of the Perl School range, please get in touch and we can discuss it.

Also published on Medium.