In article <1134601217.746672.19760@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
Hello, all.
Thought I might as well announce this "officially" as many people
know it already.
The ink is dry on the contract, and I am working on a second edition
of _The Ruby Way_. Expect to see it second quarter of 2006.
To summarize: About 100 pages deleted, about 250 pages added.
Updated from 1.6.8 to 1.8.4 (or thereabout).
If you have comments or suggestions, feel free to make them.
I can't cover everything, but I want to cover the important and
interesting
stuff (as time and space permit). If you see it in the "keyword soup"
below, it's under consideration. If you think I've forgotten something
important, please tell me in email.
Thanks,
Hal Fulton
Keyword soup:
Rockit racc rbison io/nonblock readpartial StringIO csv Oniguruma
Madeleine Oracle DBI LDAP ORMs (AR, Og, etc.) define_method
const_missing
JTTUI Qt One-click installer EXERB imap pop3 SSL ssh tunnelling OpenURI
NNTP WEBrick Redcloth Bluecloth etc. fastcgi Ruby on Rails Nitro
amrita
borges cgi-kit narf cerise SOAP REST WebDAV XML-RPC Okay (YAML)
Rinda and Ring CORBA REXML irb Test::Unit xmp pp rcov generator
enumerator
OSX KirbyBase Cocoa YAML iCal etc. vCard RSS RDF RMagick Flash (Alph)
PDF Rake mkmf extconf.rb SWIG Ruby/DL CVS Subversion gnuplot Mozilla
Java .NET RDoc RubyGems setup.rb RAA RubyForge ri vim emacs Scite
FreeRIDE RDE ArachnoRuby Komodo Eclipse Blog tools Wiki tools RCRs
That's good news!
My own 2cents:
I especially like chapter 5 (OOP and Dynamicity in Ruby) in the current
edition of TRW. I hope that perhaps a similar chapter on metaprogramming can
be added.
Also: I would like to see the second edition stick to advanced Ruby
programming topics/philosophy and mostly stay away from specific libraries (so
basically staying away from a lot of the things you list above
Why do I
say this: because the title 'The Ruby Way' implies that you're going to impart
the philosophy of Ruby programming. Your introduction leads to this as well.
But if you start loading up with too many specific libraries/etc. then it
starts looking less and less like 'The Ruby Way' and more like a tour of
Ruby libraries. A lot of items in the "keyword soup" are ephemeral -
is Rockit really being maintained and used at this point, for example? (and
what about Grammar?) I think you should focus on things that are not
ephemeral in Ruby.
Gems and Rake would be two 'externals' that should be included though, as they
are either becoming central to or exemplify The Ruby Way (Rake could be
covered as an example of metaprogramming, for example). Onigurma deserves
coverage because it will be the new regex engine. I'd like to see more
advanced coverage of things like using the various callbacks (included,
inherited, etc.), metaprogramming, functional Ruby (stuff like what's in the
"Higher order Perl" book).
Leave specific GUI toolkits like Tk, or Qt to another book...
I really like "The Ruby Way"; I would like to see it move more in the
direction of "The Ruby Way: Advanced Ruby Programming Techniques" or something
like that... as opposed to "The Ruby Way: A brief look at lots of
libraries(many of which will be obsolete by this time next year)".
Phil
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<rubyhacker@gmail.com> wrote: