Rails Test Prescriptions update 7 is now available.

The biggest changes are:

1. New chapter on Webrat
2. Expansion of my Pathfinder blog post on what to do when tests fail.

Also, a bunch of typo fixes and what not.

This is most likely the last revision of the self-published version of this book. Although the book itself will go off sale Aug 28, the revision will continue to be available for registered users going forward.

This blog will, of course, continue, watch for news on the Pragmatic version as well as the occasional cranky rant.

Future changes will be handled via an errata page on this site, and probably also blog posts here.

Thanks for your support.

Let’s lead with the headline:

Rails Test Prescriptions is going to be published by Pragmatic.

I’m very excited by this. I’ve wanted to work with Pragmatic for as long as they’ve been publishing books, and I’m thrilled that this particular project will be able to get wider distribution and access to Pragmatic’s editorial expertise and skill.

Thanks to everybody who has supported this book. I can’t express how much I appreciate your attention and enthusiasm. You have made working on this book a pleasure.

Here’s what this means for you:

• The current free “Getting Started with Rails Testing” ebook will continue to be available. If, at some time in the future, there’s a better Getting Started tutorial in the Pragmatic book, it may be offered as a replacement.

• The update site for current Rails Test Prescription owners will continue to be available for the foreseeable future.

• There will be one more official update to the current Rails Test Prescriptions, probably around the end of August. This will wrap up the chapter or two I’m working on, and tie up some other loose ends.

• After that, errata and information about changes to test tools will most likely be handled via this blog and an errata page on this site.

• It’s relevant to mention that this update would likely have been the last new content in the book even without Pragmatic’s interest.

• The current version of “Rails Test Prescriptions” will go off-sale, and will be removed from Lulu.com as of August 28, 2009.

This all happened quickly. As much as I’ve loved self-publishing, I’m looking forward to working with Pragmatic. A few weeks ago, after Gregg Pollack’s mention on the Rails weblog spiked sales for several days, I figured that there was never going to be a better time, and I submitted the book to Pragmatic. The theory being that if they said no, I still was enjoying doing the book myself, but if they said yes, it’d really be an opportunity to take this project to the next level.

Pragmatic surprised me not just by agreeing to publish the book, but by turning the whole thing around so quickly—just about a month from initial contact to signed contract. And even though I would definitely self publish again, I’m looking forward to some help on the parts of the book process I’m not that strong on (cover design, marketing, etc…).

I will know more about what happens next later this week after I start talking with my editor at Pragmatic. I suspect some reorganization will take place, as the book changes from merely individual chapters to a more coherent whole. Timeline, exact content, and other issues have yet to be determined, but I’ll keep you all posted here as I know things.

Thanks again to all those who have written me with praise and criticism, and especially to those of you who have pointed out errors of fact, grammar, or clarity. This process has been much more fun because of you, and the book is better for your attention.

This time around we have the following:

• Long chapter on RSpec
• Messed with the cover some more
• Many typos fixed, courtesy of Dana Jones

The RSpec section turned out to be the longest in the book by far, and kind of crowded out anything else I was hoping to get in this iteration.

Big thanks to Dana for catching a lot of typos and places where the text was unclear.

Next time around, it’s looking good for Webrat, among other things.

Update via http://www.railsprescriptions.com/products.

Thanks.

Quick notes before I finish getting ready to go to RailsConf:

Rails Test Prescriptions version 4 is now available both at Lulu and at the http://www.railsprescriptions.com/products product download page. If you have purchased the book and are not a registered user, please register at http://www.railsprescriptions.com/users/new.

NOTE: The login button on this page isn’t working, and I won’t be able to fix it for a few hours. Go to the main home page at http://www.railsprescriptions.com and login from there.

New in this version

• Complete chapter on Shoulda
• Section on working with a legacy project
• New cover

Couple of notes

• You may notice the file size has dropped quite a bit from the past version, don’t worry, that’s just the new and smaller cover image.
• The Lulu front page hasn’t changed (yet), but the cover of the actual PDF has.

Meantime, see you all at RailsConf, I hope that some of you will come to my talk on Tuesday and the Testing BoF on Wednesday, or at least say hi.

I have several interconnected status reports to make.

First off, a quickie that I want to put up top so that nobody misses it. I’ve added @railsrx as the Twitter account that will announce new updates and other Rails Prescriptions based information. This will allow me to separate my personal account, though I hope I’ll make that interesting enough for you to continue to follow.

As for the main news…

As I alluded to a few days ago, Lulu.com’s technical support was not helpful in resolving the issue of giving purchasers access to updated versions of the book. Essentially, Lulu treats ebook downloads the same as a physical book—the version you buy is the one attached to your account, and there’s no facility to update that attachment. I strongly suspect this is a deep-rooted architecture issue rather than Lulu really thinking this is a logical way to handle digital downloads, but that’s not really important.

For most of the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to set up a registration system on this site. If you are actually reading this on the blog, it’s up and running.

Here’s the important part if you have already purchased Rails Test Prescriptions. Head over to http://www.railsprescriptions.com/users/new to register. This link also appears on the left sidebar of all pages on this site, and on the home page. Enter an email, a desired password, and enough of your Lulu or PayPal receipt so that I can verify that you have purchased the book. As quickly as I can, you’ll get an email approving your account, and you will be able to head to http://www.railsprescriptions.com/products to download all versions of the book.

I’m sorry about the added steps of inconvenience—I was genuinely under the impression that Lulu would enable easy updates for you early purchasers. A plus side for me is that it makes it easy to give out free or review copies (RailsConf attendees take note…). It also gives you the option of purchasing new copies via the PayPal donate button. Any donation of $9 or more can be registered, and will give you access to the download page.

There actually is a book update, version 3, that will go live on both Lulu and here today, however since most of my time has been spent configuring the site, there’s not much to it. It’s an updated description of the registration process, and the beginnings of the chapter on Shoulda, which I have high hopes for, but which isn’t finished yet.

So, to sum up:

1. Existing readers should register at http://www.railsprescriptions.com/users/new
2. New readers can continue to purchase via Lulu or via the donate button on this page.
3. I’m really sorry for the inconvenience.
4. A book update will go live today, but the next one will be much bigger.

As always, complaints, comments, praise, or whatever can get emailed to railsprescriptions at gmail dot com.

Thanks

Okay, I’ve got some good news, and some less good news.

The good news: Rails Test Prescriptions, revision two is now available on Lulu.com. This version has two and a half new sections.

• A really long section on acceptance testing with Cucumber.

• A less long section on using Autotest to run your tests.

• Half a section – really an extended rant or two – on testing style.

All told, this adds about thirty some-odd pages to the book. The plan continues to be to do updates every two weeks. I think the next batch will go after Shoulda and RSpec. But if you have an opinion about where to go next, let me hear it.

Good news number two. In the spirit of “give a way a little bit more than you think you should” (advice from Merlin Mann and John Gruber in their SxSW session on blogging), I’ve decided to add the Cucumber section to the Getting Started free book. The free book is now 80 pages of how-to, slam-bang, testing goodness. Download it

Now, I’d love to be able to tell those of you that have already bought the book via Lulu that it’s easy as pie to access the download. Unfortunately, I have reason to think that Lulu isn’t quite working as I’d been lead to believe. If you go to your Lulu account’s “my downloads” page and the file is test_prescriptions_002.pdf, yay—you’ve got the update. If the file is still test_prescriptions_001.pdf, well, I’m in contact with Lulu tech support about it. Please let me know if you are experiencing update success or failure. Any problem with this upgrade is embarrassing, and I will get it resolved in the next few days, one way or another. In the meantime, the Cucumber section is available in the free download. Let me know if there’s an immediate issue that I can help with.

I’ll keep this short and sweet.

Rails Test Prescriptions is now on sale.

The Lulu URL is http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/rails_test_prescriptions/6418439. Price is $9.00. Please let me know what your purchase experience is like—and keep the Lulu receipt. I might use it for update registration in the future.

I hope you like what’s there and what will be coming. Please email at railsprescriptions at gmail dot com, or use the Get Satisfaction feedback link, or comment here. Your feedback will make a huge difference in how this project proceeds.

Also, I feel a little silly mentioning this, but I also feel silly not mentioning it. If, for some reason, you feel like supporting this project beyond purchasing a copy—like, you want to distribute the book throughout your organization, there’s a PayPal donate link on this site. Funds will go toward improving the book and this site.

Thanks for all your support and kind words over the last few months.

I’m pleased to announce that the getting started guide, conveniently titled “Getting Started With Rails Testing” is now available for download.

It grew to be a bit longer than I originally intended, but I’m very happy with how it turned out. It starts with an empty Rails application and walks through the first couple of feature additions, adding tests for controllers, models, views, and basic security.

Download, read, enjoy, tell all your friends, let me know what you think. And watch this space for the inevitable errata release, and further announcements about the longer book.

How’s the tutorial coming, you ask?

Slowly but steadily. But slowly. But steadily. I’m hoping to have something available this week. If it doesn’t make it this week, it’s going to be postponed a week because I have a deadline for a separate article on Phusion Passenger that will be on developer.apple.com, and I’d kind of like to get that one in on time.

I’m having the same trouble I always have with attempts at real-world examples, namely that the more realistic the example is, the harder it is to keep focused on the subject of the tutorial because there are so many pesky real-world details that have to be managed.

What I’ve learned from doing this before is that, broadly speaking, there are two kinds of readers that need to be satisfied by this kind of step-by-step tutorial. One group is really going to try to recreate the tutorial each step of the way and they (rightly) get annoyed if steps are missing. The other group is more interested in the gist and they (rightly) get annoyed by, say, two pages of instructions about how to get the exact setup for the application. One thing that is definitely true is that I tend to hear from people in the first group—if there’s a flaw in the instructions, I’ll hear about it.

I really like the way Ryan Bates handles this in his outstanding Railscasts, he has a couple of simple application shells that he adds the new feature to, so he can just cut to the chase. On the other hand, most of Ryan’s casts need to start with an already existing application, whereas I’d like to be able to show mine starting from scratch. Still, he has a great way of cutting to the chase that I’d like to emulate.

In a related story, it does look like there will be a screencast of the tutorial, though we’re still working out details like how long it will be and whether it will also be free.

Sorry about the Radio silence here for the last week. Let me make it up to you with a site update including a slight change in what we might generously call the Rails Prescription business model.

The comments on this post rattled around with a nagging thought in my head. I had been starting to worry whether the recipe-style format I’ve been writing in would have a decent entry point for a reader who was a near-total novice at testing. In conjunction with the comments on caboo.se and some feedback I’ve gotten, I decided to stop the part of the book I was working on and start working on a new tutorial for getting started with test-driven development practices.

I’ll be giving the tutorial away free on this site staring sometime in early January—I have to finish the writing, and I want to make some site changes to support distributing content.

The tutorial takes a reasonably real application, and walks through the first few feature additions, showing all the tests and the code the makes them pass, with a lot of discussion on why particular tests were written and others were not. It’ll include controller tests, model tests, view tests, tests with RESTful authentication in play, and I’m not sure what all else yet because I haven’t finished it. Mostly, I’m really writing this application but just taking some detailed notes on how I’m testing it.

I’ll be distributing the source code as a git repository with numerous branches corresponding to different points in the tutorial so you should be able to recreate the exact state of the application to help see what’s going on.

This works for me because I was looking for a convenient chunk of the book to use as free content, and because it gives me a chance to get feedback on overall tone, PDF layout, and so on.

This works for you because hey, free content! It’ll be a great place to get started with test-driven development.

I’d like to read a brief statement, and then I’ll take a few questions.

Today I’m happy to announce the grand opening of Rails Prescriptions, a purveyor of fine Ruby on Rails books and book-like products.

The first book from Rails Prescriptions will be titled Rails Test Prescriptions: Keeping your application healthy, and will be available for order in January, 2009.

Rails Test Prescriptions is a comprehensive guide to automated testing for your Rails application, containing more than 30 individual prescriptions on various Rails testing features and techniques. I’ll be continually updating the book after its initial release to allow for changes in Rails, new testing tools, correction of the occasional error, and reader feedback. I want this book to stay in date as long is it has readers.

And now, your questions. I’m guessing:

What format will the book be released in?

The book will be a DRM-free PDF file. Additional formats (like a print-on-demand version) may be offered if there’s an outcry.

How long will the book be?

Not sure how meaningful this is because the page formatting is optimized for screen, but the PDF will probably wind up being around 200 pages give or take a couple dozen.

What’s the schedule and pricing?

The final book will probably be $9, and will be available sometime towards the end of January, 2009. Free samples will most likely pop up by the end of 2008 or so, and there will be a chance to buy a beta/incomplete version earlier in January, probably at some discount. But I haven’t decided on that for sure.

Once you’ve bought the book, you’ll be able to get free updates regularly for some extended period of time. I really want this book to stay up to date and useful.

January is like, weeks in the future. Why announce it now?

Because I want to hear from potential readers now. I have an outline with about 30 potential sections. But I want to know what’s important to the people that might actually buy this book. What tools would you like to see documented. What part of Rails do you find hard to test? Generally, what would make a book on Rails testing something you would actually use to make your work easier?

How can I make suggestions?

The two best ways are to email to railsprescriptions at gmail.com or head over to our Get Satisfaction link at http://getsatisfaction.com/railsprescriptions. You can also direct message me on twitter.

How can I follow the Rails Prescriptions news?

Subscribe to the Rails Prescriptions 24 Hour Window blog. Also, I’ll be updating via twitter, follow me there.

How far along is it?

Something like 30% of the first draft complete at this point.

Why this book, this way, this time?

Well here’s a funny story. I started pitching a (different) Rails book to publishers, a process that started in June ‘08, and resulted in a tentative offer toward the end of October. That required me to turn in the book in April ‘09 for publication in August ‘09. That’s a long time, especially since there’s no easy way to keep a major-publisher book up to date.

So, I thought, I can do this myself and get it out in front of people a whole lot faster than 14 months. And I could keep the book up-to-date. And choose my own tools and layout. Suddenly this started to sound like a lot of fun.

Having decided to distribute my own book, it seemed like a book on testing would be a bit more fun to start with than my original plan. (If things go well, some form of the original book will be the second Rails Prescriptions title).

Sounds great. Now what?

Thanks for reading this far. Check out the Rails Presciptions blog and the twitter feed, and watch this space for more info.