[ruby-talk:10884] Re: book review, opportunity for advocacy

Neil Conway <[e-mail]> writes:

> as I promised a little while ago, I wrote a book review of 'Programming
> Ruby' for kuro5hin.org (if you don't know the site, it's a weblog like
> Slashdot, except the users choose the stories, lengthier discussions
> are encouraged, and trolling is not tolerated). I gave the book a rating
> of 9/10. I think I was fair, but I'd be happy to discuss my comments
> with other readers of the book, or even the authors themselves. The
> review is here:

I think it's a fair review. Your major complaint is with the coverage 
in the middle section, and I can see your point. We were faced with a
pretty stiff editing job when writing the book: there's just so much
stuff surrounding Ruby, we couldn't document it all. So, we decided to 
take a representative sample of stuff that

1. we knew people were using, and
2. we felt was stable

The result is very much a lightening tour around Ruby applications,
but we're fairly happy with that. Hopefully, our terseness will
encourage others to go out and write "Web Programming with Ruby" and
"Ruby Under Windows" and so on. I think if there's one think I regret
not including, it's RubyUnit, but our editor would have killed us (as
we were already over our page budget by a factor of two).

Again, many thanks for the review.


Dave