If you'll be at RailsConf next week, there's an easy way to get your copy of Advanced Rails Recipes signed by a number of recipe contributors. (With over 50 contributors, it's a tad more difficult to hunt them down one by one.)
We've arranged a group book signing during the 12:35pm lunch break on Friday at the Powell's Books booth. We hope you'll stop by, get your book signed a bunch of times by these great Rails chefs, and just have fun!
The paper book version of Advanced Rails Recipes is now shipping! If you bought the combo pack during beta (thanks!), you should be receiving your paper copy any day now if you haven't already. Dave surprised me with a copy at the beginning of a Studio last week. I'm really happy with the way everything turned out, and it feels good to finally have this one in circulation.
You might still be wondering what's inside the book. Reading the table of contents is a good start (and includes a couple freebies), but I thought you might also want to see a few recipes in action. So I put together a short (12 minute) screencast that highlights the results of 17 recipes with strong visual appeal. (Watch the screencast.)
Big shouts out to all the contributors! You guys rock.
Advanced Rails Recipes is recipe-complete! I snuck four more into the fourth beta revision that was released today, for a final total of 84 recipes. That's a good round number, and this puppy needs to go to print soon, so the kitchen is officially closed. :-)
Here's what's new:
Send Lightweight Messages (using Starling)
Nest Resources to Scope Access
Automate Periodic Tasks
Encrypt Sensitive Data
Thanks for submitting errata! We worked the list down for this beta revision, and added a few new things here and there to the existing recipes based on your input. For example, we expanded the Solr recipe to include more information on the solr-ruby library. We also addressed a few corner cases in the multi-model form recipe. Finally, we thought nested routes deserved their own recipe. So we expanded nested routes into a new recipe in this revision, and added a :member example to the recipe on adding custom RESTful routes to keep it focused on non-nested routes.
Please keep the errata coming. The book will go into production (copyedit, indexing, layout, etc.) in a week, and I'd really appreciate a good scrub of all the recipes. If you only have time to read through a couple, please go straight for the shiny new ones.
Thanks again for your continued support!
That's 14 more get 'er done recipes, for a total of 81 in the third beta revision of Advanced Rails Recipes. Yeah, I know I promised 72 recipes. Sorry 'bout that. Y'all just kept sending me more, and they were so good I simply couldn't resist. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the extras.
Here's what's new:
Process Recurring Credit Card Payments
Support An iPhone Interface
Send E-mail via Gmail
Segregate Page Cache Storage with Nginx
Build a Sitemap
Full-Text Search with Sphinx
Customize Error Messages
Load Balance Around Your Mongrels' Health
Quick & Dirty Search
Use Fixtures For Canned Datasets
Cheap & Easy Caching (requires Edge Rails)
Drive a Feature with Integration Tests
Write Domain-Specific RSpec Matchers
Use DTrace for Profiling
Current recipe contributors include: Aaron Batalion, Adam Keys, Andre Lewis, Andrew Kappen, Ben Smith, Chris Bernard, Chris Haupt, Chris Wanstrath, Cody Fauser, Dan Benjamin, Dan Manges, Daniel Fischer, David Chelimsky, Erik Hatcher, Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Geoffrey Grosenbach, Giles Bowkett, Greg Hansen, Gregg Pollack, Hemant Kumar, Hugh Bien, Jamie Orchard-Hays, Jared Haworth, Jarkko Laine, Jason LaPier, Jay Fields, John Dewey, Jonathan Dahl, Josep Blanquer, Josh Stephenson, Josh Susser, Kevin Clark, Luke Francl, Mark Bates, Marty Haught, Matthew Bass, Michael Slater, Mike Hagedorn, Mike Mangino, Mike Naberezny, Mike Subelsky, Nathaniel Talbott, PJ Hyett, Patrick Reagan, Peter Marklund, Pierre-Alexandre Meyer, Ryan Bates, Scott Barron, Sean Mountcastle, Tony Primerano, and Warren Konkel.
Now, don't tell my editor (Hi, Dave!), but I may end up sneaking a couple more juicy recipes into the final revision. They're already in progress, but not quite ready for the beta.
The book will go into production (copyedit, layout, etc.) very soon, so if you notice any problems and things that could use a bit more clarification, I'd really appreciate it if you'd file errata. I'll work 'em all off for the final revision.
Thanks to all the contributors for their fantastic work!
The second beta revision of Advanced Rails Recipes is now available. The contributors and I have burned the midnight oil since the first beta to pack as many new recipes as possible (25 more!) in for your New Year reading pleasure. Here's what's new:
Analyzing SQL Queries
Caching Up With the Big Guys
Creating a Wizard
Creating Meaningful Relationships Through Proxies
Decouple Your JavaScript with Low Pro
Dynamically Updating Cached Pages
Freshening Up Your Models With Scope
Generating Custom Error Pages
Geocoding to Find Things By Location
Giving Users Their Own Subdomain
Handling Multiple Models In One Form
Keeping E-mail Addresses Up To Date
Keeping Forms Dry and Flexible
Monitoring (and Repairing) Processes with Monit
Off-Loading Long-Running Tasks to BackgrounDRb
Preserving Files Between Deployments
Processing an Asynchronous Workflow
Receiving E-mail Reliably via POP or IMAP
Responding To Remote Capistrano Prompts
Taking Advantage of Master/Slave Databases
Testing HTML Validity
Tracking Test Coverage with RCov
Updating Partial Resources with AJAX
Uploading Images and Creating Thumbnails
Validating Required Form Fields Inline
Current recipe contributors include: Aaron Batalion, Adam Keys, Andre Lewis, Andrew Kappen, Benjamin Curtis, Chris Bernard, Chris Haupt, Chris Wanstrath, Dan Benjamin, Dan Manges, David Chelimsky, Erik Hatcher, Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Geoffrey Grosenbach, Giles Bowkett, Greg Hansen, Gregg Pollack, Hemant Kumar, Hugh Bien, Jamie Orchard-Hays, Jared Haworth, Jarkko Laine, Jay Fields, John Dewey, Jonathan Dahl, Kevin Clark, Luke Francl, Marty Haught, Matthew Bass, Michael Slater, Mike Hagedorn, Mike Mangino, Mike Naberezny, Mike Subelsky, PJ Hyett, Patrick Reagan, Peter Marklund, Pierre-Alexandre Meyer, Ryan Bates, and Sean Mountcastle.
We'll continue to refine these recipes and add new ones for the next beta revision. Thanks to all the contributors for their great work!
Enjoy!
Now that the much-anticipated Rails 2.0 is out, I'm very pleased to announce that Advanced Rails Recipes is now available in beta form.
This has been an especially fun project because the book is a collection of recipes from folks around the Rails community. We're filling this volume the same way my family filled our recipe box in our kitchen. Advanced Rails Recipes includes tasty recipes from many great chefs. These are people you trust who have created applications you may have sampled. This book is an informal survey of what some of the best developers in the Rails community think is advanced and important.
The current beta has 42 recipes, and there are another 30 or so on the way. All the recipes were baked with Rails 2.0 and Capistrano 2.1.0.
Thanks to all of you who contributed recipes, and thanks for enjoying our dishes!
As promised, here's the list of books I've found invaluable in learning to craft better HTML and CSS, in the order I recommend reading them:
I'm a big fan of Dan Cederholm's simple, effective, standards-based, and gorgeous work. He's a gifted writer to boot. You're well advised to read anything he writes.
For reference, I use:
I'm also looking forward to feasting my eyes on a copy of Transcending CSS. It looks stunning.
Hope that helps!
The Laws of Simplicity is a lovely little book. Exactly 100 neat and refreshing pages. An inspiration to makers of things. I won't risk making it complex with a review. Enjoy!
I was honestly planning to get some "real" work done this afternoon. That is, until I made the mistake of opening the latest Pragmatic Friday: Google Maps API. Here comes the understatement of the year: This stuff is cool!
Seriously, I've been seeing these integrated maps pop up all over the 'net, but I never had the time to dig through blogs and whatnot to assemble the necessary pieces of information. And with technology this close to the hemmoraging edge and just outside my core interests, I'm inclined to sit back and wait for a concise write-up. Here's where I think the Pragmatic Fridays format really shines—timely, focused, and authoritative information that you can put to work immediately. (And at $8.50, I think it's a great value.)
Scott Davis has done a remarkable job bottling up everything I need to know to do web mapping like the cool kids. And truth be told, I'll still get real work done this afternoon. It took about an hour to read through the 71 pages of well-written explanations and comprehensive example code. Again, the Fridays format lends itself really well to this topic in that the PDF has external hyperlinks to running examples. I found those to be tremendously helpful.
So after just an hour, I'm confident I could put a dynamic Google Map in any web app.
Bravo, Scott!
Obligatory disclaimer: Despite my relationship with the Pragmatic Bookshelf, and contrary to popular belief, I don't make any money off sales of this book. I simply think it rocks!
When Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management, one of the latest titles in the Pragmatic Bookshelf, showed up at our door, I literally had no chance. My better half scooped it up and wouldn't give it back until she'd read every word. To make matters worse, as she was reading it I was continuously reminded just how great the book is. So I asked her to write a review, which follows.
If you're thinking about management—think again! If you're already in management—think pragmatically! Behind Closed Doors confronts the unspoken myth that star individual, technical performers will naturally want to be and, conversely, know how to be star managers. This quite simply isn't true. Technically-skilled folks don't transform into gifted managers on their own. They need help.
Thankfully, Johanna and Esther have written an excellent book full of specific tips and pragmatic advice on the most fundamental and key aspects of management. I'd recommend this book to any first-time managers, anyone thinking of making the leap from technical to management, or anyone managing by the seat of their pants.
Behind Closed Doors is presented in small enough chunks that you can actually work through all the suggestions over a couple of months. But if you're thinking you need more short-term help, the book is chock full of specific advice that can be implemented today, without delay. And should you want to dig deeper into a topic, the bibliographies at the end of each chapter make it easy to find additional resources. For example, if you're struggling with finding the right new hire, Johanna and Esther offer proven ideas and techniques as well as suggested additional reading if you want a lot more depth.
I wish I would have read this book years ago before going into management. I might have decided otherwise, or at least had a better chance at making it a smoother transition. Still thinking about management? Do yourself a favor and read this book first!
Advanced Rails Recipes
May 2008
Agile Web Development with Rails
December 2006
Pragmatic Project Automation
July 2004
