Beginning Rails: From Novice to Professional
posted by pete on July 23rd, 2007
It was June of 2006; Jeffrey Allan Hardy, Cloves Carneiro Jr. and I road-tripped to the very first RailsConf together in Chicago. Shortly thereafter, Cloves moved to Dubai to bring Rails to the indoor ski mountain and really tall hotel set. Meanwhile, I was so impressed with Jeff that I all but demanded he come and join the Unspace team. A year on, Jeff commutes 1.5 hours — each way — three days a week.
It is with great pride (and calculated prejudice) that I am able to announce the publication of Jeff’s first book, “Beginning Rails: From Novice to Professional” through Apress. A labor of love over the past year, I’ve watched Jeff work with a revolving cast of co-authors. He’s had his target audience, scope and title change. The poor guy just soldiered on and today we can celebrate his efforts.
Beginning Rails: From Novice to Professional
Somewhere along the way, Hampton came on board as technical reviewer. He committed a chapter on Active Record, and another one on deployment. He and Jeff even sequestered themselves in a Niagara Falls hotel room for a week of serious power-writing. It was a long journey, but it was well worth it.
Beginning Rails is the practical starting point for anyone wanting to learn how to build dynamic web applications using the Rails framework for Ruby. It’s the perfect book for someone that has some web development background, or perhaps someone involved in a startup, who wonders how they can use Rails to bootstrap an application in weeks instead of months. It assumes basic familiarity with the technologies that make up the web, but doesn’t require that the reader know how to program, how to configure a web server, how state is maintained on the web, or how to create and connect to a database.
This book does not delve into every arcane detail of Ruby, or Rails. Instead it focuses its energy on the pieces of the framework that most developers use most of the time, and seeks to assist novice developers in getting started on the right foot.
There is one strange detail to report, however. Jeff wanted the Rails logo on the cover of the book but was informed by Apress that David Heinemeier Hansson has been “politely resisting” permission to use the logo, and has said in the future, it will only appear on his books.
Sure enough, the Rails site does indicate that he holds the trademark on the logo. However, I see David as a community steward, and take issue with his refusal to allow the Rails logo on any books other than his own. My reason is simple: rails.png is part of Rails, and is in every new project. Rails is licensed under MIT and that would imply that putting the Rails logo on a book about Rails is a clear fair use. If David wanted to set up a vetting process for good quality control, I’d support that. Beginning Rails is a good book, though, and deserved to have the Rails logo on the cover.
Milestone: Haml 1.7 is Fast
posted by pete on July 10th, 2007
Congratulations to Hampton, Nathan, and the rest of the Haml core team on their most recent release.
Haml is an alternative to ERb (aka RHTML) view templates that allows you to build your pages with a semantic, nested structure using familiar CSS-like syntax. Not only is Haml now almost as fast as ERb, it is demonstrably 16 times faster than its competitor, Markaby. Pow!
A year on, Haml is being taken seriously not just by Rails developers, but increasingly by designers that use Haml to realize a 1:1 connection between their markup and CSS. Creative teams love Haml!