From: robert.calco@...
Date: 2002-04-03T01:55:01+09:00
Subject: [ANN] Announcing New Ruby Book Under Development!

Everybody:

Just thought the community would like to know that it's official: We'll be writing a new book on Ruby for Sams Publishing. The "Ruby Developer's Handbook" (not to be confused with the excellent "Ruby Developer's
Guide" by Syngress) is slated for release in January, 2003 -- we're just now signing the contract and solidifying the Table of Contents.

We aim for this book to be the ulitimate hard-core Ruby developer book. We'll cover advanced development topics in great detail, especially the low-level Ruby C API, and kick off a suite of new open source Ruby packages, extensions and applications that will be built in conjunction and
released with the book itself.

By way of example, rather than cover existing GUI toolkits, our book will have a chapter on building a GUI toolkit/framework for Ruby _from scratch_! We'll actually _use_ concepts like aspect-oriented programming to implement
numerous developer utilities. We'll teach the Ruby C API by building real-world bridges to existing applications with C/C++ interfaces, step by step, in a progressively advanced treatment of the subject. We'll even cover building your own Ruby distribution from the source, and packaging it
for deployment, and much more. So we hope you see this isn't going to be just another scripting book.

In fact, the central organizing theme or context of the book will be using Ruby as a developer toolsmithing language, a glue for the software development and testing process regardless of the underlying implementation
language or platform, a means to unify the life-cycle and integrate the disparate tools, techniques and methods of software engineering. In this sense the theme of the book transcends Ruby per se, but in so doing, we think lends a legitimacy to Ruby as a "serious development language"
that software engineers from diverse development backgrounds can use in their everyday activities.

Any thoughts, suggestions, wish-lists, or ideas are welcome and appreciated -- we want this to be a book of, for and by Ruby software engineers. So any feedback you can offer while we're still getting this endeavor off the ground will be taken seriously. :-)

Sincerely,

Bob Calco (robert.calco@verizon.net)
Rich Kilmer (rich@infoether.com)
Dana Moore (dana.moore@bbn.com)