From: Dave Thomas <dave@...>
Date: 2008-05-29T01:07:50+09:00
Subject: [ADV] New Beta of PickAxe3

I've been thinking long and hard about the tutorial section of the  
PickAxe. It's the section of the book that seems to create the most  
emotion in readers: most folks seem to like the unconventional style  
(starting with classes and objects and working down) and some folks  
hate it. A while back, I asked here what people thought, and used what  
was said to guide me.

So this new beta of the PickAxe keeps the same overall structure for  
the tutorial. But I'm rewriting it to do two things:

1. I'm getting rid of the jukebox (loud cheers were heard throughout  
the land). The jukebox was always no more than a skeleton project on  
which to hang sample code illustrating points in the tutorial. But it  
never really went anywhere in the book. So now I'll be using smaller,  
self contained code fragments. Some of them are just targeted to show  
a particular Ruby feature, and others do (at least vaguely) useful work.

2. I'm being more opinionated when it comes to the ways you should  
write code. So, for example, I'm pushing class inheritance way back,  
and instead focusing on mixins as the preferred way of structuring the  
sharing of functionality. (Obviously, inheritance still has a place,  
but I'd like to see less instances of code like "class Product <  
ActiveRecord::Base')

Along the way I'm dropping in more 1.9 goodies.

So, if you're an existing beta reader, log in to your account and  
refresh your PDF. Be patient though, there's already a backlog...

"Thank you" to everyone who helped by expressing an opinion.

(If you'd like information on the book, it's at http://pragprog.com/titles/ruby3/programming-ruby-3)


Cheers



Dave