Pragmatic Status and Some Q&A
I certainly hope some of you are wondering how the transition to the Pragmatic version of Rails Test Prescriptions is going. Here’s some notes.
Right up top, I want to mention that I’ll be presenting at Windy City Rails on September 12th, with a talk called “How To Test Everything”. There are, I think, still some seats available for the conference, and I’ll get the slides up online as soon as I can.
The self-published version is now off sale—the text on this site will change shortly to reflect that. The update and registration pages are still up, so registered users can continue to download revision seven of the book.
A couple of people have asked me if Pragmatic is going to have some sort of special deal for people who have purchased the self-published version. My answer is in three parts. First off, I don’t know and I’m not the person who would make that decisions. Second, I’d be surprised if they did something directly, the logistics from Pragmatics perspective seem like a pain. Third, without promising anything, I am hoping to do some kind of acknowledgement of the people who bought this book originally, but it’s too soon to tell what form that might take.
Right now, moving the book forward is happening along two different avenues. First, translating my text, which is Markdown, to Pragmatic’s XML/DocBook-like markup. It’s not quite fully automatable, but with the power of TextMate behind me, it’s going fairly quickly. The main slowdown is the sections with actual live code (as opposed to example snippets that aren’t really in a live app). Loving that I can still write in TextMate and build PDF’s from the command line—a wonderfully geeky way to work.
It looks like 1 self-published page is about 2/3 of a Pragmatic page. We’re tentatively hoping that the book as published will have at least 250 pages of text, so if you do the math, that means that at least 25% of the Pragmatic book will be completely new—some new topics, extensions of existing topics, probably a bit more on the TDD process rants, of which there is less in the book than I thought (everthing existing will be updated and polished, of course.) I know what a lot of that new ground is going to be, but I’m open to suggestions as well.
The other avenue I’m discussing with my editor is the structure of the book. The self-published version was originally conceived as something like a recipe book, but it’s not really much like a recipe book at the moment. We’ve decided not to publish it as a recipe book, which means reordering the somewhat random chapter order into something more coherent, and probably consolidating some of the smaller chapters together. Ideally, this will make the entire book easier to follow and easier to browse.
One last thing: I’ve had some questions on how I reconcile the “this book will always be up-to-date” things that I’ve written with dead trees. Fair question. Here are some answers:
- I am large and contain multitudes.
- Pragmatic is unusually good about keeping their content up to date with e-book updates, and also with public, maintained errata pages on their site. I felt the book could still be kept relevant for a long time.
- It dawned on me sometime over the summer that I has basically set myself up with an infinite task and I’ve been trying to think of a way to make doing this book more manageable. I like that the book part of this now has something like an end point, then I can try to keep everything current in some other way.
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