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.

I’m thinking the tutorial draft is pretty close to being done enough to let loose on an unsuspecting public. Look for it on Monday or Tuesday.

If anybody is interested in being a beta reader for this, and thinks they can get comments back to me before Monday, I’d be thrilled in having a couple of people look at this before the entire Internet gets a crack at it.

If interested, send an email to railsprescriptions at gmail dot com. Thanks!

Just a quick note on what’s up…

Thanks for all the feedback on the book design in the last few posts, I’m quite happy with what I’ve wound up with.

The tutorial is either draft-complete or nearly so, I need to read over it and decide if adding the next section will make a significant difference in the material it covers. It’s now running smack into my Jan 9 deadline for the separate article, but I’m still hoping to make some headway on it and get something out by the weekend.

Thanks for your patience.

Thanks so much to those of you that commented on the book design—I appreciate your time and good taste, especially Brandon Martinez, who went far enough as to create his own mock up.

Overall, the general idea was to make the design cleaner and lighter, with fewer different elements.

I made the following changes—obviously Brandon’s design was an inspiration here.

• The body text is now 12 point Century Gothic. The code text is now 12 point monaco.
• The headers and footers are now also Century Gothic.
• Code syntax highlighting is now being done with CodeRay. This gives line numbers on each code sample, and I think is a slightly less garish set of colors, though I may go in and tweak that further.
• The blue sidebar box is gone now, sidebars are now denoted by a line under the header, and a smaller, justified font.

I like this better, which was the point of asking for comments in the first place. I hope you also like it better. Same two pages, more or less.

Page One

Page Two

Upcoming: a description of the tool set I’m using to generate the PDF files, and why I think it’s not crazy.

Here are two things that may or may not be related:

1. I get to create the entire layout of this book.
2. The tutorial is running a little bit longer than I expected.

The length of the tutorial is due to one or more of the following:

1. I’m being too long winded and making this too complicated. This tends to work itself out as I go through several drafts.
2. I’m getting caught up in the weeds and details of the actual application that don’t relate to testing.
3. The page layout that I’m using is not putting enough content on a PDF page. This doesn’t affect the amount of content, but could make the book less useful.

In the past, my thoughts about book design have mostly been limited to complaining about the design of the Pro Rails Book—I’m not a huge fan of Wrox’s layout.

It seems like a good idea to try some user-testing on the book layout, since it’s under my control and relatively easy to change. So here are two screen shots of pages from the current version of the tutorial PDF:

Page One

Page Two

I’m looking for your thoughts on issues like the font size, sidebar layout, code coloring, and the like. The basic layout comes from the boom! CSS microformat and has also been used by PeepCode and Envy Casts, but I’ve modified the fonts and layout quite a bit. (The overall work flow is based on these scripts, but again, I’ve messed with them a bit.)

If you’re a font, layout, and design geek, I’d love to get your opinion.

• The body font is 12 point Lucida Grande
• The code font is 12 point Inconsolata, and coloring is handled by Ultraviolet.
• The header and footer font is from Comicraft—it’s their Dave Gibbons font.

Thanks for looking—I’d love to know what you think.

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.