Noel Rappin Writes Here

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…

Here’s a couple notes on the current status of the Rails book and life in general. The Rails book is presently just about 30% done – first payment triggered (yay!). I’m reasonably happy about it so far, though definitely too close to it at the moment to have a clear sense of its quality. I do like the way the test integration is working out – it seems to help my descriptions of functionality to have the tests there.

To continue on the fame and fortune theme, I just got the first part of the statement wrapping up the first year of the wxPython book. (Since the book came out at the end of March, we got a first quarter statement which covered the first 10 days of the release). Anyway, I’m pleased. The fourth quarter statement was only about 5% down from the third quarter (I don’t have the exact numbers).

This message showed up in the Manning Sandbox forum for wxPython In Action. After saying some nice things about the book, the poster has some suggestions: I would love to see an advanced volume covering topics such as XRC, using XML to define a screen layout; creating custom widgets… internationalization, and a full chapter or more expanding on chapter 5 “Creating your blueprint.” I find that… program organization is most important yet little seems to be written about it, for any programming language….

Robin Dunn and I were interviewed for Ron Stevens’ excellent Python 411 podcast – you can download and listen to the .mp3 file here. It’s about 45 minutes long, which should mean that Ron used nearly all of the interview. Hope you like it. It was a lot of fun to do. Thanks again to Ron for having us on, and also for the very nice review of the book he wrote on Slashdot.

I’m pleased to be able to link to a new article: Build cross-platform GUIs using wxWidgets available on the IBM developerWorks site. The original title was “wxWorld”, and it’s a quick look at wxPython, the wxWidgets toolkit, and some of the other wxWidgets language bindings. I had some fun digging through the different language tools trying to create short wx programs in each. Hope you like it.

I wouldn’t say it happens often, but I do sometimes get asked some questions about being a technical author. Seemed like a good place to start. For a long time, the most common question was Did you pick the animal on the cover of the Jython book? The answer is no. The cover animals are picked by the O’Reilly production team, and the mechanism they use for assigning animals to books is somewhat mystical.