A number of updates, since it’s been a while since I posted anything remotely update-y.

First off, as those of you who follow me on twitter already know, there’s been a change in my employment status. Starting Monday, I’ll be working for Obtiva. I’m very excited about this. I like to do a lot of different things &emdash; code, lead teams, coach, do training, write &emdash; and it looks like I’ll get the chance to do pretty much all of them at Obtiva. Some of you reading this were helpful either by offering support or helping me make a connection, thank you all.

Obtiva doesn’t do a company blog the way Pathfinder does, but I’m hoping to continue to write about Rails, software development, TDD, or whatever else springs to mind. I do think I might switch to a different blogging platform though, the spam attacks are getting to be a little to much for the haphazard install I’ve got going here.

As for the book, it’s moving along. Oddly, job hunting actually didn’t give me as much time to work on it over the last couple of weeks as I was hoping. All the text has been converted to Pragmatic markup, we’ve come up with what I think is the new structure of the book, which groups chapters by common topic more strongly than the original structure did. Hoping for a round of editing based on that structure to be completed shortly, and then we’ll move on to the last round of new chapters, and whatever other review and edit processes come next.

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.

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.