Almost There… Book Wise.
I’m now entering the home stretch of writing the Distributed Programming with Ruby book. I’m just a few weeks away, well, technically I’m hours away from finishing the last chapter (Delayed Job) in the official table of contents, however, I’m going to add another chapter and a half. Why? Mostly because I’m a glutton for punishment. That and I want to deliver the best book possible. The extra chapter and a half, not featured in the table of contents below, will be on MapReduce technologies. It’s a really hot topic, and I think it will fit well in the book. What do you think?
Unfortunately, the “Rough Cuts” book on O’Reilly’s Safari site hasn’t been updated in nearly 3 months! I’m not sure why. I keep asking my editor to update it, but it hasn’t happened yet. I’m sure it will soon, especially since the first draft of the entire manuscript will be done in just a few weeks!
UPDATE: Today they updated the “Rough Cuts” with nearly the latest revisions. It’s still missing the chapters on Delayed Job and BackgrounDRb, but it’s closer than it was yesterday.
Anyway, as a public service announcement to you, the readers, I thought I would the table of contents as it stands right now, so you have a better idea of what the book is going to be about. So here it goes:
What do you think? Does it look good? Is this something you’d buy? Let me know. This is your chance to have an influence on a book. If you think something is missing or should be laid out differently, please let me know, it might just make it into the final product.
Ok, enough delaying here, let me get back to writing so I can finish up the Delayed Job chapter.
Tags: book, delayed job, distributed programming with ruby, drb, map reduce, rinda
July 27th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
Looks very good. I’ll check out the rough cut.
July 27th, 2009 at 10:07 pm
Thanks. The Rough Cuts will be a lot nicer when they finally update it.
I assume at this point they are just waiting for the full first draft to update it, which is just a couple of weeks away at this point. Please let me know what feedback you have. I’d love to hear it.
July 28th, 2009 at 11:54 pm
Personally, not that excited. The problem for me is that while this is relevant now, what’s to say half of these technologies will even be around in 2 years? The dragon book teaches fundamentals that were valid when the book originally came out, and are still valid today. I’d be more excited to read a book about distributed programming fundamentals, and then worry about learning the application with ruby, and existing technologies on my own. The book could be applied to virtually any language then, and not just ruby. That’s just one of my little preferences when it comes to books.
July 29th, 2009 at 3:18 am
Sounds very good. Looking forward to reading your distributed Ruby book. Something like this has been missing for a long time.
One question. Does the book also cover performance tuning and scalability of distributed Ruby programs? This is often an issue.
I am playing with JRuby a lot these days. Is this also covered when there are difference for some libraries in comparison to the C version?
July 30th, 2009 at 11:21 am
Contents definitely look great. Look forward to the book. It’s good to see finally a good book coming up in Ruby distributed programming.
July 31st, 2009 at 11:09 am
This is shaping up to be pretty awesome!
Looking forward to reading your book Mark.