Noel Rappin Writes Here

I think we’re going to be even more random then usual today. Here goes: If you downloaded the epub version of Rails Test Prescriptins beta 3, then you may have noticed that the promised Cucumber chapter isn’t there. The PDF is fine, and I have no idea about the mobi version one way or another. If you were affected by this, please go back to the Prags site and grab the file again, it appears to have been fixed.

Book Status The Cucumber chapter is nearing final edit for beta. I cleared up a handful of errata, of which probably the most serious was a mistake on how to get the fixture data to pass the first test in the book. I’m hoping to get Beta 3 out later this week, and then I have to decide which direction for beta 4. Oh, and the book: still on sale.

Top Story Just a quick update here. Cucumber chapter newest draft is complete, and I’m hoping it will be beta 3 early next week. Not sure what to do next, I need to look around and see what’s relatively stable with respect to Rails 3. The book is still on sale. Tell all your friends. And then Rails Dispatch this week is about the new routing in Rails 3. Yehuda Katz has a really nice article on workflow with git.

Top Story I ran the Lulu raffle last night, and all five winners have responded. For what it’s worth, I took a list of users from my database, generated a random series of numbers from random.org, and the users corresponding to the first five numbers in the sequence were picked. Congratulations to Peter Bosse, Tim Harvey, Cameron Pope, Joshua Ball, and Christian Knappskog. You’ll be contacted shortly with information about receiving your prize.

Top Story / Book Update Beta 2 of Rails Test Prescriptions is out. The biggest addition is the chapters on integration testing and Webrat/Capybara. Beta 3 will be coming next week and will include all or most of the Cucumber chapter. Please do post to the forum, there’s not any discussion there, and I’m interested to hear any questions or comments you might have. Other People’s Books A lot of book links today.

Book Status Working toward beta 2, which will probably come out early next week. It’ll include chapters on integration testing, and webrat/capybara, and maybe the Cucumber chapter, depending on if I finish the redo. Also, the setup appendix with at least partial Rails 3 info – still sticking on how best to integrate the user plugin. Thanks to Dan Benjamin and Jason Seifer for mentioning Rails Test Prescriptions (still on sale) on The Ruby Show episode 115.

Top Story MacRuby 0.6 is out. Big new features include a debugger, a new interface to Cocoa’s Grand Central Dispatch, and a rewrite of the internals of basic Ruby classes. In a related story, the early text of Matt Aimonetti’s MacRuby book from O’Reilly is available for free online. Nice job all around. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it here, but I use MacRuby and its ability to manipulate AppleScriptable programs to power my crazy-obsessive iTunes random playlist generator, so speed improvements are hoped for.

Hey, where were you? Sorry about that, I spent most of last week running the Obtiva Ruby/Rails/TDD 4-day boot camp training, and I didn’t have time to do this daily catchup. Hey, if you think you need me or somebody like me to come to your company and blather about Ruby and Rails for a few days, contact us at http://www.obtiva.com. It’s fun. Book Status Rails test prescriptions: still on sale.

Top Story For me, the top story is still Rails Test Prescriptions on sale, and my discussion yesterday of the raffle for the old Lulu customers. Book Status Now re-doing the Cucumber chapter, which was written long enough ago that it didn’t consider tags. Cucumber has had approximately seventy-million releases in the interim, so there’s some writing to do. This is the first chapter where I’m adding Rails 3 setup instructions, which will eventually go everywhere in the book, of course.

Only Story Special post today, then we’ll get back to the relatively normal format tomorrow. If there’s one question I’ve been asked more than any other since signing Rails Test Prescriptions with Pragmatic, it’s whether something would be done for those of you who bought and supported the original self-published version. We all really wanted to recognize those of you who bought the first version of this book, but there are practical constraints.

Top Story If you think the top story is going to be anything other than the continued launch of Rails Test Prescriptions, well, you probably don’t know me very well. I may not be a marketing genius, but I do know the value of repetition. I mean, if there’s one thing I know, it’s the value of repetition. Thanks to everybody who made yesterday fun: those of you who bought the book, those of you who blogged or tweeted about the announcement, and anybody who read this.

Top Story So, about yesterday… Funny story. Some of you may have gone to the Rails Test Prescriptions book site hoping to buy the book only to see a conspicuous lack of an “Add to Cart” button. The book was for sale for about ten minutes, just long enough for me to start jumping up and down about it, then was pulled due to some issues with the ebook files. I heard that the famous PragProg ebook generating gerbils went on strike, but that’s just a rumor.

Top Story What else, but the actual live sale page for Rails Test Prescriptions, which is http://www.pragprog.com/titles/nrtest/rails-test-prescriptions. You should be able to see the cover off to the right sidebar. (As I write this, they haven’t turned on the “Buy” link, sometime today, I think). I like the mortar and pestle in the cover, it has a nice resonance with “prescriptions” and also, at least for me, a little bit of a tinkering kind of vibe.

Top Story / Book Status As far as I know, everything is still good for the book to go on sale tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll post all the info – url, cover, pricing. I don’t plan to be subtle about it. As for the writing itself, I finished the next drafts of the chapters on integration testing, webrat and capybara, the capybara bit probably still needs some more research. Right now I’m working on an article on mock testing for the Pragmatic Magazine, next up after that is probably a look through the Cucumber chapter, which I originally wrote about a year and umpteen skillion Cucumber releases ago.

Top Story/Book Status This is the week – Rails Test Prescriptions should go on beta sale on Wednesday. In a related story, railsrx.com now points to here, railsprescriptions.com also will shortly. I’ll be adding some basic about information and static pages here. At some point, I’ll probably bring over any blog content from the previous site that still seems relevant. I’m not sure if the original free version of Rails Test prescriptions will still be available (it’s becoming out of date, and there will be free samples available at Pragmatic), but I will make it available if anybody is still interested.

Top Story and Book Update I have sample cover designs. I don’t think I can show them yet, but I’ve got ‘em, I like them, and hopefully we’ll have picked one to show shortly. Tab dump Not a whole lot today: Here’s a look at the current status of using a non-blocking MySQL driver with Rails. The promise here is for significantly faster database access. Two stories that are related to projects that I worked on back in my EdTech days:

Book Status Not much new to report. Still in the webrat and capybara space. It does look like April 21 will actually be the beta date really and for true. Top Story Well, it’s got to be Joss Whedon possibly directing the Avengers movie, right? The Internet would never lie to me about Joss. It’s not like there’s a collective internet freakout any time some rumor about a Whedon project comes through.

Book Status The initial beta release of Rails Test Prescriptions has been pushed back at least a week. It’s not anybody’s fault, just a traffic jam of books all coming into the system at the same time (including, I assume, the new iPad book). Hoping to see a cover and other details in time for next week. In the meantime, I’m continuing on as if we’re in the beta, which means I’m now revisiting the section on integration testing.

Actual public beta of Rails Test Prescriptions is finally getting close enough that I can see it. Unless I forgot something from my conversation earlier today, there are three things that need to be done before the book can be put on beta-sale: Both myself and Colleen, the editor, need to do one more read through the chapters in question to make sure there aren’t any gaping things missing.

The book went out for 50% technical review this week, covering the first nine chapters, which is about 160 pages. With the warning that I don’t actually decide any of this stuff, it seems like if the reviews are basically positive, then the book will head into beta purchase while I work on the rest of it. I doubt that will happen in February, but I’m really hopeful for sometime in March.

Here’s where we are in the publishing cycle of Rails Test Prescriptions: The book went through a major hurdle in December when it went through “Publisher review”, where three chapters were submitted to Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt for review. Dave and Andy, thankfully, said mostly good things, asked for a few revisions, and caught some relatively minor technical issues. (I suspect the major technical issues are in a later chapter…).