Noel Rappin Writes Here

In response to the commenter who asked if there was going to be a beta book. UPDATE: Clearly I should ask about these things before I post. Jim Minatel from Wrox added the following in comments: There will be a PDF about six weeks after the print book, meaning end of March or thereabouts. There will also be an Amazon Kindle version, eventually. Also after 6 weeks, the book will be available via Wrox’s online subscription service: http://wrox.

Just got the next version of the book chapters for my examination. I’m not 100% sure exactly where these fit in the process. It looks like they’ve had a good look-see from a copyeditor, largely for style, clarity, and consistency. (Any lingering “we” sentences seem to have been pruned, for example). They produced a book-specific style guide, which is a listing of canonical forms for things like plugin names, capitalization of commands or tools and the like.

Some things I learned about Rails and writing while working on this book: The great benefit of working on a project like this book is that it enabled me to compress about two years worth of research into Ruby and Rails tools into six months. In my case, this was a great opportunity to really dig into some tools to find that I’ve only been using a fraction of their power and also really get a sense of how elegant and flexible the tools are.

Two things on the Pathfinder blog. Agile Publishing, on publishing experiences and agile methods. Live Ruby: Testbed, an attempt to work through a small test and metaprogramming problem live and on the blog. Enjoy.s

I turned in the last chapter of Author Review on Monday, and Professional Ruby On Rails is now in production. Target release date is still mid-February, final page count will be in the range of 450. I was able to keep the test-first nature of the code going through nearly all of it, which I’m really happy with. The table of contents looks something like this (in theory, still subject to change…)

Wow, I haven’t been here for a while. Sorry about that. Here’s the deal… The Rails book initial draft went in about a week ago, more or less on time. (Well, on time for a slightly revised schedule). My understanding of the current schedule is that the author review phase will continue through November. After that, it goes to production, where I get another crack at revising thing that have changed.

Couple quick things while I have a minute… Just turned in Chapter 10 (of 16) of the Rails book. Still mostly on schedule for a turn in on October 26, not quite sure what that implies for a print date As I write this, the wxPython book is at 11 thousand and change on Amazon, the highest I’ve seen in months, which is probably a fluke. Weirdly Amazon says it’s the #15 book on “Website Architecture & Usability”, which would be great if it was, you know, actually about website architecture usability…

Naturally, I did have a thought or two about the new Apple products and the other announcements this week: While I certainly understand why somebody who had purchased an iPhone early would be annoyed by the price cut, I did find it kind of funny that many of the same analysts who said the iPhone would never sell at its original price were then jumping on Apple for dropping the price.

Another blog post up on the Pathfinder site. This one is about Agile in general, and features what I think is the World Blog Premiere of the soon to be famous Boring Software Manifesto. Enjoy.

A few things I forgot to put in the last book update: The Amazon listing has the book at 600 pages. That’s almost certainly optimistic. The contract calls for 400-500. As far as the schedule goes, I’m currently hoping to turn the complete draft in on October 26th, which is about ten days after the original date. The publisher says that pushes publication out to April, six to eight weeks after the original date.