I signed up to help write, and I hope others do as well. It's a shame that the poor documentation is such a barrier preventing Sproutcore's adoption. I was hoping that with the formation of Strobe that things would get better, but they really haven't. Hopefully this effort will be able to bridge that gap.
I wholeheartedly agree that SproutCore's documentation is poor. There have been plenty of reasons (and excuses) provided, but regardless, that still doesn't cut it. We're beginning to rectify the situation with Guides (http://guides.sproutcore.com) which was announced on Friday. There is already one written (http://guides.sproutcore.com/fixtures.html) and there are more in the pipeline, being written by both core team members and developers from the community. Given we're a startup, sometimes things need to take a backseat but Strobe is definitely committed to making developing web apps as easy as possible and documentation is high on the priority list.
Out of curiosity, were none of the major tech publishers interested in a book on SproutCore?
I hope it goes as smoothly as they hope, farming out the writing tasks in parallel. I've found it tough to work with just one distributed co-author on a tech book, much less 60.
I'm working with the Three20 framework for the iPhone, and it suffers from similar documentation problems, though it's gotten better in the last few months.
I think its just 1-3 developers, unless I'm misreading. Still, I'm sure it'll be a challenge to get good content from them as they are not going to be compensated directly for their work.
Yes, Addison-Wesley is, as are O'Reilly and Prag Prog. The problem is not the publisher, it's the writing! That's what the proposal is designed to solve...
I'm very much hungry for more screencasts, more books, and more Sproutcore tutorials. It's an amazingly powerful framework, but its not easy to learn without some frustration.
I love this idea, and hope it goes through. I'll definitely be contributing
