[ANN] My book is out -- Ruby on Rails: Up and Running

ruby-talk
21

Greg Donald wrote:

Congrats Curt. Question though, why is a quick start guide selling for $30 ?

Here it is for a bit less:

Amazon.com

and even less:

http://www.bookpool.com/sm/0596101325

$20 does seem pretty high for a book with less than 200 pages.
Especially since I just picked up Ruby Cookbook brand new from the
used section on Amazon for $31 including shipping, and it's nearly 900
pages.

Thanks for the links, although I'd have to disagree with your line of
reasoning regarding the number of pages somehow being the guage of a
book's worth. K&R is around 220 pages, and its one of the best damn
technical books I have read to learn a new language.

these days people conflate more pages with more information and
therefore (somehow) more value. I have gone throug half a chapter on
some of the technical books and realized that the author could have very
easily described the same thing is a couple paragraphs. Times like these
leave you with a vague feeling of being cheated of our precious time
somehow.

I don't know when we started technical information as if we were bying
oats by the tonne, but I'd rather take the short and sweet rather than
the drawn out version that uses various kinds of filler to just look
respectable on the bookself. Time is more important and if I can get the
same info in less time, then by all means give me a short book.

sorry, I'm just sick and tired of reading 500 page books which only hold
about 20 page worth of real valueable information. Just makes me feel
cheated sometims. 80% of the "technical" books out there these days are
utter garbage, and only feed this weird book fetish most of us techies
seem to have.

Having said that , this is a general comment and not a comment on either
of the two books you mentioned. Authors seem to get beaten up a lot
these days for not putting enough pages, putting too many pages, putting
too much detail, not putting enough detail etc. etc.

kudos to Curt and Bruce for putting the efffort in for the book, the
market will decide the eventual value and worth of each item.

just my 2c, no offence intended.

Cheers,

Amr

···

On 8/25/06, Dark Am bien t <s am bie nt@gmail.com> wrote:

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/\.

22

Exactly. While it's well known that one can, for example, measure the
productivity of a programmer by the number of lines of codes that he
generates per hour, one cannot similarly measure the quality of a book
by its page count.

···

On 8/26/06, Rob Sanheim <rsanheim@gmail.com> wrote:

More pages doesn't necessarily mean more value.

23

Jeff Pritchard wrote:

Elliot, why do some people get annoyed by "top post's"? Seems perfectly

I think top-post sums it up
nicely.

I top-post my email, but rarely do it here. Sometimes it just seems
more natural to have what I want read at the top (the first place seen)
of the email. Sometimes it makes more sense to intersperse my comments
with quotes from the original.

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/\.

24

In article <5c937586f970e998a332f785f4818c8b@ruby-forum.com>,

Elliot, why do some people get annoyed by "top post's"? Seems perfectly
normal to put the new relevant stuff at the top and leave the rest below
as "reference". I'm not annoyed that you're annoyed, just annoyed
that I haven't been able to figure out why it annoys you (and a few
other people). :slight_smile:
thanks,

Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?

···

Jeff Pritchard <jp@jeffpritchard.com> wrote:
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
A: Top-posting.

--
--Tim Smith

25

I'm not even sure you can measure a programmer by lines of code per night.
Think of how many lines a person could consume doing this the wrong way:

class Foo
  attr_accessor :my_instance_var
end

SteveT

Steve Litt
Author:
   * Universal Troubleshooting Process courseware
   * Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful Technologist
   * Manager's Guide to Technical Troubleshooting
   * Twenty Eight Tales of Troubleshooting
   * Rapid Learning: Secret Weapon of the Successful Technologist

···

On Saturday 26 August 2006 10:17 pm, Lyle Johnson wrote:

On 8/26/06, Rob Sanheim <rsanheim@gmail.com> wrote:
> More pages doesn't necessarily mean more value.

Exactly. While it's well known that one can, for example, measure the
productivity of a programmer by the number of lines of codes that he
generates per hour, one cannot similarly measure the quality of a book
by its page count.