November 2007 Archives

In the post below I hinted at a secret contributor, besides Matz and myself, to the Ruby book. Amazon now displays the latest cover design for the book, and all can now be revealed....

To find out who's contribution I am honored to have in this book, click on the Amazon.com link to the right to visit the pre-order page for the book. This will let you see the cover at a readable size--look for the "see larger image" link. If you've been working with Ruby for a while, you will recognize the new name on the cover.

And when you've recovered from your surprise, you can pre-order your copy of the book! :-)

Update: the name has now disappeared from the cover. I don't know why. When I first posted this, it read: "with drawings by why the lucky stiff"

I've submitted my Ruby book to the production department at O'Reilly.They're going to allow me to make last minute changes as the final details (mainly IO encoding issues) are implemented in Ruby 1.9, but it really is going to get printed in very early 2008. (At the risk of repeating myself, let me suggest that you pre-order it now!)

In other news, the cover (which you can see enlarged in the post below) is being modified to add another name alongside mine and Matz's. I'm keeping this a surprise for now, but I will say that the name is well-known within the Ruby community, and that I think everyone will be happy with this person's contribution to the book!

My upcoming book, The Ruby Programming Language, now has cover art!. Here it is (hotlinked from amazon):

The birds on the cover are Horned Sungem hummingbirds. (Ruby-throated hummingbirds would have been nice, too, but these are beautiful birds and have "gem" in their name!) Here are photos showing the "horns" on the male and the cool-looking tail.

The Wikipedia entry has this to say about horned sungems:

The Horned Sungem (Heliactin bilophus) is a South American hummingbird, the only species of the genus Heliactin. The scientific name bilophus is sometimes considered a nomen oblitum, which, if accepted, results in Heliactin cornutus being the correct name for this species. It can achieve 90 wingbeats per second when it's hovering to drink nectar from flowers. A wingbeat is one complete up-and-down movement, which means that the horned sungem moves its wing muscles at a rate of more than 10,000 times per minute. It prefers fairly dry open or semi-open habitats, such as savanna and Cerrado. It avoids dense humid forest.

The book is nearing completion and I hope it will be available within one month of the release of Ruby 1.9. Pre-order it today! Your enthusiastic (I hope :-) pre-orders will help O'Reilly know how many copies to print. And amazon.com offers an additional 5% discount on these early orders.

I am pleased to announced that I'm nearing completion of The Ruby Programming Language, an updated and expanded version of Matz's Ruby in a Nutshell. It will be published by O'Reilly in early 2008 and is available for pre-order now at Amazon.com

Here's how I describe the book in the preface:

This book is an updated version of Matz's book Ruby in a Nutshell which has been expanded well beyond O'Reilly's Nutshell format. As its new title implies, this book covers the Ruby programming language and aspires to do so comprehensively while still being accessible to any experienced programmer who takes the time to read it carefully. This first edition of the book covers Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9.

Ruby blurs the distinction between language and platform, and so the coverage of the language includes a detailed overview of the core Ruby API. But this book is not an API reference and does not attempt to document every class and every method of the core library. Also, this is not a book about Ruby frameworks (like Rails) nor a book about Ruby tools (like rake and gem). This book does not attempt to teach OO programming, or any kind of programming methodology. And although this book documents Ruby authoritatively, it is not intended as a specification for the language: language implementers will need more than this book to correctly implement Ruby.

If you're going to be at RubyConf this weekend, my editor from O'Reilly will have drafts of the book that you can take a look at. If you're not going to be there, you can't see the book itself, but you can browse the table of contents to get an idea of the breadth and depth of the language coverage. (This TOC includes a relatively short table of examples. The book actually contains quite a bit of example code, but most of the examples are unnumbered and don't appear in the TOC.)

I've been working on this book for about a year now and am very excited about it. My hope is that it will be for Ruby what JavaScript: The Definitive Guide is for JavaScript!