Meta Bates

About.com became the first, that I know about, to review my book, “Distributed Programming with Ruby”. What a great first review to have as well. They rated the book 5 out of 5 stars! The review can be found here.

“Anyone working with distributed programming in Ruby will want this book.”

The only downside they saw in the book, was that they wanted it to be longer! I have to save something for the 2nd edition, don’t I?

If you haven’t purchased yours yet, I encourage you to do so. It’s on sale at Amazon.com right now.

If you have reviewed the book, or know of a review of the book, please pass it along.

Well folks, it’s been a long road, nearly a year since I presented the idea for “Distributed Programming with Ruby” to Obie Fernandez in a hot tub in Florida, but finally my book is done, dusted, back from the printers and available for purchase from a variety of places, include Amazon.com!

It was an absolutely amazing experience and I can’t thank everyone involved with the project enough for all of their help, guidance, and having to put up with me over the past year.

I would go into detail about all the people I wish to thank, but I did that already in the book, and let’s be honest, you’re going to buy it and read it anyway, so I don’t want to ruin the surprise.

I’m sure you’ve already purchased your copy, but if you haven’t might I recommend you pop over to Amazon right now and pick yourself up a copy. They’re selling pretty well and you don’t want to miss out, do you? I didn’t think so.

If you are someone with a popular blog and you would like to do a review of the book, please drop me a line and I’ll see what we can do about hooking you up with a copy. Please understand, though, the publishers aren’t going to send out copies to everyone who requests them, so there will be a bit of vetting going on.

Also, if you have already purchased the book if you wouldn’t mind leaving a review of it on Amazon, that would be much appreciated. It doesn’t matter where you bought the book, if you could leave a review there, it will really make a difference. Thanks.

Buy “Distributed Programming with Ruby” Today!

So with my book, Distributed Programming with Ruby, finally finished, and a nice long weekend I was able to sit down and work on a little pet project of mine. I decided to work on a little site that I could use to track my rather large Pez collection. (Yes, I know, I collect Pez – so what!)

While working on it I got to use some new technologies that I really haven’t had a chance to play, so I thought I would talk a bit about some of the ones I liked the most.

Authlogic

Love it! Finally a decent authentication system! The thing I love most about it? It doesn’t generate a lot of crap in your project. If I were to say one bad thing about it, it would be that it doesn’t generate enough in your project. I know that sounds silly, but it’s the truth. It gives you so much power, without having to generate a ton of lib code and crazy controller code, which is awesome. However, it would be nice if it had a generator that generated a ‘basic’ application for you. Just a little thing, apart from that, love it!

http://github.com/binarylogic/authlogic/tree/master

Cucumber/Webrat

I’m sure by now everyone has heard of Cucumber. I’m not going to pretend that I’m the first to that party! Over the last month or so I’ve really started to use it and it has completely changed my life. That’s not an overstatement.

Cucumber lets you write features and scenario in human readable format. Combine that with Webrat, which lets you do things like click buttons and follow links, you can write some amazing tests that look like something a project manager would write! Brilliant!

These tests beat the hell out of Rails integration tests. Trust me! I love watching Cucumber and Webrat click around my site while I just watch.

http://cukes.info/
http://github.com/brynary/webrat/tree/master

Web App Theme Generator

This cool little plugin helps you to quickly generate a very useful, and laid out, theme for your application. The themes would be familiar to anyone who has used sites like Lighthouse. They’re basic, but they are very well coded and get you on your quickly so you can have something that looks fairly decent.

My only gripe with this plugin is that it is a bit clumsy to use, but thankfully you don’t have to run it very often, only when you create a new controller/resource.

http://gravityblast.com/2009/07/30/2-minutes-admin-layout-with-rails-and-the-web-app-theme-generator/

Delayed Job

The last piece of tech is Delayed Job. I first discovered Delayed Job when I wrote about it in my book. It is a great way to handle and process background tasks. It’s easy, reliable, and scales really well. I’ve been using the Collective Idea fork of the project. It has a generator to create the migration you need. It also has a nice binary to run in the background on your server.

I’ve also been using a little gem I wrote that gives me hooks into Hoptoad, the is_paranoid gem, and a nice subclass for writing workers.

I have been completely enamored with Delayed Job from the first moment I used it, and I’m sure if you haven’t checked it out yet, and you do, you’ll feel the same!

http://github.com/collectiveidea/delayed_job/tree/master
http://github.com/markbates/delayed_job_extras/tree/master

There you go, that’s just a few things I’ve been playing with lately, that I think are going to become mainstays in any Rails project I work on. Hopefully this has given you a little for for thought on things you can use in your next project.

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.

For those of you who have checked out the Rough Cuts version of my book, “Distributed Programming with Ruby”, I thought you would like to get a peek into how the Table of Contents is going to change shortly. For those of you who haven’t seen the old Table of Contents, or are just plain old interested to see what’s going to be in the book, or to see how far along with the book I am, here is the current Table of Contents as of tonight:

As you can see it has evolved quite a bit from what was posted on Rough Cuts just about a month ago. Chances are that it will probably change again, and as it does, I’ll try and keep you all posted. There is talk of adding a large chapter at the end that takes a handful of the technologies I discuss in the book and use them to build a “real world” example application, like a Twitter clone, or something like that. If anyone has any good ideas on what they would like to see for this example, please them my way, I’d love to hear them.

If there are no sections listed below a particular chapter that means that I have either not written it yet, or I’m still too early in that chapter’s development to have properly assigned it actual sections.

The first draft of the book is slated for the end of July. So there is still a lot of work to be done, but it’s still rather exciting. Well, it’s exciting for me at least. Talk to you all soon.