Thursday, November 29, 2007

We're In Production Now...

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...)

Chapter 1: Setting up a new Rails project using REST

Chapter 2: Using Subversion on a Rails project

Chapter 3: Users, secure logins, email authorization, etc...

Chapter 4: Rake, writing build tasks, and using CruiseControl.rb

Chapter 5: Navigation elements, including menus, tagging, search, and pagination

Chapter 6: Database topics, including legacy databases, relationships, and security

Chapter 7: Testing tools: RCov, RSpec, ways to test views and helpers, and so on.

Chapter 8: Rails and JavaScript. Using Rails and Ajax plugins for some common tasks. RJS. Testing RJS.

Chapter 9: ActiveResource, generating and reading XML data, including RSS feeds

Chapter 10: Time and Space. Managing time and time zones, using Globalize for internationalization

Chapter 11: RMagick, ImageMagick, MiniMagick, and other graphic tools. Gruff and Sparkline charts.

Chapter 12: Deployment with Capistrano and Mongrel

Chapter 13: Performance benchmarking and optimization

Chapter 14: Using Ruby metaprogramming in your Rails application

Chapter 15: Using and creating plugins. Testing plugins and generators

Chapter 16: ERB replacements and JRuby

Appendix A: Things to download

Appendix B: Other tools inspired by or similar to Rails

Two Pathfinder Blog Posts

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

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Heads Up

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. It goes to press toward the end of January for publication mid-February. If everything continues smoothly.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I think I said almost everything I was hoping to. The main constraint was the tight schedule -- I'm hoping to get some newer features and plugins in during author review.

Oh, and I had another Pathfinder blog entry a few weeks ago. This one is about the CDBaby Rails/PHP thing that was kind of a flap way back then.

That's all for now, I'll try to get back updating the Twitter feed and get back to writing here and on the Pathfinder blog more regularly... Thanks.