Building Books
Dave recently gave a few of us a demo of how he puts code in books. Actually, it was more than a mere demo. He actually built the Ruby book at the push of a button right before our eyes. Oh, and it didn't really build. No, I seem to recall that the build failed. That's right, it's all coming back to me now. He had a newer version of Ruby installed on his machine, and the code in the book relied on an older version. Or something like that. Why it didn't build isn't all that important. The simple fact that he knew it didn't build got me really excited!
After I've had sufficient time to detox, I'll start thinking about my next book. What I know for sure is that I want to be able to push-button build it. A successful build should compile all the code, generate its output, run tests that verify the output is what I expect, and format the code with its output into the book's format. That is, I want to build books that contain code just like I build code.