[ruby-talk:11353] Re: Programming Ruby is now online

On Thu, 22 Feb 2001 04:01:01 +0900, Dave Thomas
<[e-mail]> wrote:

>
>A first version of the book Programming Ruby is now available, both
>online and for download.

I add my thanks to Dave, Andy and AWL for making this available.

However, can I make a suggestion?  I think one of the most useful
parts of the book is missing.  There's no index in the HTML ... either
that, ot I'm going blind :-).

I realise that this is presumably generated by LaTeX and would refer
to the page numbers in the printable version.  However, I assume one
could do something like take the list of words mentioned in the index,
do a search across the HTML files and replace the page numbers with
equivalent hyper-links?

I'd love to take this on, but I would guess it's easier for "the guys"
to do it, since they have intimate knowledge of the LaTeX and how the
XML and LaTeX are used to generate the HTML.

I'd be happy to have a go at generating the HTML if you'd be willing
to provide the LaTeX-generated index.  It would be an interesting
exercise and a chance to practice my Ruby.  However, it might take
somewhat longer than it would for the authors.

If you can provide an index, it would be useful to put a link to just
that file on your web site ... presumably called something other than
"index.html" :-) ..., so people can download just that single file,
rather than having to pull down the entire thing again.

In any case, I think having the HTML version of the book on my laptop
will make life so much easier for me when I'm at uni and just makes it
more likely that I'll decide to code things in Ruby, rather than
something else.

Great work!