Noel Rappin Writes Here

Sorry for the radio silence for the last week or so, but I was waiting to be able to announce this: Today I started a new job at Pathfinder Associates, as a senior software engineer in charge of Ruby on Rails projects. Needless to say, I’m thrilled to be back in the Web game professionally, and even more thrilled to be working on Rails projects. Everybody at Pathfinder has been super great so far, and I’m looking forward to doing exciting and fun things.

Well, that’s a pleasant surprise. Somebody named Stephen has left a comment. And not one of those spam thingies, but some actual relevant questions about tech publishing. Answering them seemed like it might be fun.. I noticed there is a pdf version available of your books. Is this something you or the publisher insisted on? Have people shown an interest for this version or are they still overwhelmingly favouring the hard copy?

In the interests of being able to push out quick updates on the book’s progress, I’ve created a Twitter account for the book. You can follow that account on the sidebar of this here blog, or at http://twitter.com/noelrappinbook – there’s also an RSS feed. Please remember that any and all information about the book is subject to change at whim. Enjoy.

It’s been about a week or so of continued radio silence, so I thought I’d pop in with an update. I’m in the middle of chapter three of the Rails book. I think it’s going well, but nobody other then me has read the chapters yet, so that’s easy to say. My first milestone date is the end of the month, and four chapters done – that’s about one-quarter of the entire book.

I’m pleased to be able to say that I’ve contracted for a new book, Professional Ruby on Rails, scheduled to be available in “early 2008”, hopefully February or March. The publisher is Wiley, through the Wrox imprint – the ones with the red covers and the author’s picture on them. Wiley wanted me to be sure and mention that the ISBN number is 9780470223888, so you’ll be ready to pre-order it the second that becomes possible.

It’s not exactly part five of the four part GWT series, but it is closely related. Please check out my newest article on IBM Developerworks: Simplify Ajax development using Cypal Studio for GWT. I actually wrote this a few months ago, when the tool was still called Googlipse, and the final publication was delayed a bit while I rechecked all the code and instructions, and changed the name throughout. One note: it seems as though the GWT 1.

I posted a version of this to JJ Behrens’ Blog post about Ruby, and decided it was probably worth also posting here. I use and like both Ruby and Python, here’s why… Things I like about Ruby with respect to Python I think Ruby is the only language that gets accessors right. The thing you want to do 95% of the time – simple access – is trivial, and the thing you want to do 5% – something fancy in your accessor – of the time is a pretty easy override.

I think I’ll have to join in the general chorus of the underwhelmed. Bullet points: The new desktop and finder sure look shiny. The dock stacks do look kind of useful, and having a dedicated downloads folder strikes me as a classic kind of Apple UI move. Having the finder be visually similar to iTunes strikes me as, on balance, a good idea. And, although I don’t find Cover Flow tremendously useful in iTunes, I can see a place for it in the Finder.

Due to circumstances somewhat beyond my control, I find myself working in the largest Perl project I’ve ever done. Now, I’m not in the least interested in a “my language is better than your language” deal because a) this strikes me as very well covered territory, and b) it seems particularly pointless as the Perl 6 team appears to be doing a nice job of taming Perl’s more rococo features.

Couple thoughts on Apple’s first foray into the brave world of non-DRM’d music: I think the most of the user experience in iTunes is handled nicely. There had been some worry about this – I seem to recall some speculation before the EMI announcement that Apple would only take out DRM if they could do it store-wide, and keep things simple. Anyway, the iTunes Plus branding and the simple option to either always or never see the plus songs seems to work just fine.