Noel Rappin Writes Here

There is a plan. It goes like this: Master Space and Time With JavaScript will be split into four parts. Part one and part two will be available sometime in July. I’d say July 1st, but I’ll still be in Scotland. It’d be sooner, but there are still logistics to be managed around the actual layout of the book and getting the payment gateway in order. Plus, I need to actually finish the text.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that I’ve been writing the same two or three chapters for six months. I think — I hope — this is the last time. This is a more or less weekly update on the manuscript currently known as Master Space & Time in JavaScript. Today, the update is about the first few chapters and how they change over time. These chapters cover a lot of ground, and getting the order and beats right has been a struggle.

Next up on the Master Space and Time With JavaScript status report is the workflow that takes my words and turns them into a PDF. And an HTML file. And an ePub. And don’t forget Kindle. As you can imagine, this is something of a minefield, although there are a lot more tools available than there were three years ago when I did this the last time — here’s an overview of the process I used then.

And now, the return of the semi-occasional link post. I’m going to try to do this at least once a week, but who knows. If you are writing JavaScript, you should be looking at Justin Searls and his JavaScript testing tools. Justin posted the slides for what looks like a great talk on JavaScript testing. These slides made me happy. In random media sales, the audio book of World War Z is on sale for a mere six bucks.

Now that the new book is public, I’m going to start doing more frequent status updates. It’s going to be weird for me, after keeping the project under wraps for so long, but I’m sure we will all get by. When the book, shall we say, reverted back to me, I had two immediate questions: what to write, and how to deliver it to a (hopefully) desiring public. Let’s talk about the content first, though in practice, I needed to make sure I had a tool chain I liked before proceeding.

Hello, and welcome to my new site, noelrappin.com. I have a new site because now that I have another book to promote, having the site be named after the previous book seemed perhaps not in keeping with the best marketing practices. Speaking of the new book, it’s called Mastering Space and Time With JavaScript, and you can find out more information about it. The book should go on sale in June, if you’d like to be notified, please fill out the handy interest form.

The key to fast tests is simple: don’t do slow things. Warning: this post is a kind of long examination of a problem, namely, how to integrate fast non-Rails tests and slow Rails tests in the same test suite. This may be a problem nobody is having. But having seen a sample of how this might work, I was compelled to try and make it work in my toy app. You’ve been warned, hope you like it.