...do you think the book is like a money grab or something? We put it big on the site because a bunch of our users were excited about it and found value from it. The book doesn't even remotely pay for itself.
> ...do you think the book is like a money grab or something?
Yes. Regardless of what you intended, IMHO, it comes off as a money grab, and the fact that it glows and "Get the book" is in that high contrast purple doesn't make it better. Maybe it's just me, but I would suggest making it less conspicuous.
edit: and the book image causes a content layout shift when it loads
I appreciate the perspective. Honestly for us it was just something that our whole user base was mega excited about, and so we made a big deal about it. It seemed like a positive that there was a book available (especially given that young-ish frameworks benefit from some level of legitimacy, given that it's a Prag Prog book etc.). I never even considered that it would rub people the wrong way honestly.
I think I'll probably keep it front and center for now, given that the book will be launched out of beta in the near future, but I can see how it might give the wrong idea, and will reconsider its placement going forward
About books: I had a horrible experience in the past with Trailblazer, the Ruby library.
The documentation was horrible, and only had extremely basic examples. The recommendation to any question I saw online was always to buy the book for almost anything. The goal of the bad docs was clearly to encourage people to buy the book. That rubbed me off and it felt like a cash grab.
And of course I'd buy a book and donate for a library I'd want to support, but for Trailblazer's case it's the opposite, I never voluntarily chose to use it and actually would like it to die.
Coming to the site from an aggregator (and needing to be convinced to use Ash, rather than coming there directly and already knowing I want to use ash) I found the book a little weird to be so front and center.
I would have really hoped for a small code snippet or screenshot showing how powerful the framework was. And a book a little further down from that would be nice. But "pay to learn" before "here's a quick snippet on why ash is neat" would have made me more excited for this thing I hadn't heard of before, and who's website I was visiting to learn about.
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Seeing a book first gave me a different impression -- like one of the old snooty languages/tools from twenty years ago that was really enterprise-only.
I can tell that's not the vibe Ash is aiming for, but it's what I picked up!
(Somehow, I also couldn't find the documentation link on the first two tries. But that's also my eyes being weird and missing the sticky header where it clearly says Documentation!)
