http://townx.org/blog/elliot/cat-bag-expulsion-scenario-my-rails-book Comments for "Cat/bag expulsion scenario: my Rails book" en http://townx.org/blog/elliot/cat-bag-expulsion-scenario-my-rails-book <p>The cat is out of the bag: my forthcoming book on Rails, grandly entitled <a href="http://www.packtpub.com/Ruby-on-Rails-Enterprise-Application-Open-Source/book">Ruby on Rails Enterprise Application Development: Plan, Program, Extend</a>, is now being advertised for pre-orders on the <a href="http://packtpub.com/">Packt website</a>. I was keen on calling the book <cite>Rails in Context</cite>, as to my mind that is the book's strength: showing Rails in a realistic context, working with other tools. (No one else liked that title, though.) The book is not intended as a replacement for the classic <cite>Agile Development with Rails</cite>, but more as a complement to the excellent reference material that book and others provide.</p> <p>The focus of the book is on building a Rails application in the context of a small business: setting up a realistic <span class="caps">SME </span>infrastructure for Rails, an overview of how to develop with Rails, installing and configuring a Subversion server, unit testing, using Ruby to write scripts for data import, deployment using Capistrano, and some simple techniques for improving performance using caching and load-balancing (Apache + Mongrel). The result is a simple contact management system with tasks and file uploads, which is dog-ugly but practical. If you want to see it for yourself, you can check it out from my public Subversion repository with:</p> <pre> svn co <a href="http://svn.receptacular.org/Intranet/trunk" title="http://svn.receptacular.org/Intranet/trunk">http://svn.receptacular.org/Intranet/trunk</a> </pre> <p>I didn't write the book all on my own: I was ably partnered by Rob Nichols, a friend I met through <a href="http://openadvantage.org/">OpenAdvantage</a>. It's taken just over a year to write, and has been killing me in the evenings during that time, even though I only had to do 5 chapters. I think it was worth the effort, and I'm pretty pleased with the result (as pleased as a perfectionist can be). (By the way, if you're thinking of writing a book, let me reiterate what everyone says: it's hard, and probably not very lucrative from a cash perspective. I did it because I've always wanted to have a book published and I enjoy writing.)</p> <p>Go and buy it. If you pre-order it now, you'll even get a discount!</p> http://townx.org/blog/elliot/cat-bag-expulsion-scenario-my-rails-book#comments tech Wed, 26 Sep 2007 13:01:31 -0500 elliot 673 at http://townx.org