I took a glance at the table of contents, but more efficient to ask you directly: What does this book add or teach that isn't out there already?

I hope that doesn't come across as snarky, I don't mean it to be.

@ambition - not a snarky question at all. The Rails book market is certainly growing crowded, so I think it is a very valid question. I hope this isn't a cheesy thing to say, but I really tried to make this the book I wish that I had to guide me after I had been experimenting with Rails for a while.

This book is different for a few important reasons:

First off, it speaks to issues of design rather than issues of API. That has important ramifications in the way the material is covered. Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic) and The Rails Way (Addison) are two fantastic books, and both are on the shelf next to my desk right now, but they both concentrate on exhaustive coverage of the Rails API. The Art of Rails is meant to be the kind of book you buy after owning one of those. It takes someone familiar with the /syntax/ of coding Rails and attempts to provide guidance and insight into the /style/ and design patterns of architecting an entire application with Rails.

Second, it devotes three whole chapters (8, 9, and 10) to developing with the "Ruby style". So many web developers learn Ruby because of Rails that they eventually get to a point in their Rails development skills where they stand to really benefit by taking a few steps outside of Rails to learn how Ruby is a fundamentally different language than {PHP, Java, other OO/Procedural languages}. The Art of Rails really devotes a significant effort to talking about the new and Ruby-centric design patterns that constructs like blocks, Procs, method_missing, and instance_eval make possible, and then it provides examples of how you can use these design patterns in your Rails applications.

Third, it backs up design patterns with useful, concise examples that you can actually execute, but otherwise stays clear from drowning you with example code that is better left to online format.

Finally, I wrote it to read cover-to-cover, or at least a chapter at a time, whereas a lot of tech books these days are really centered around dictionary-style reference lookup. This book should be fun to read, have you nodding your head, and leave you with some useful abstractions, coding techniques, and new tricks when you're done.

I'll stop here to prevent myself from leaving a run-on comment, but thanks for pushing back for more justification of the book

"@edwardbenson"

Hope you don't think this is too snarky, but there's really no need for the at-signs on a site that has threaded comments ;-)

what can I say -- old habits die hard :)

I know I'll probably be reviewing this book for Ruby Inside anyway, but.. tip for the future: Use better headlines for posts on HN ;-)

cool! congrats on the book

would you mind writing about how you came about getting a book deal?

were you active in the rails community? Did wrox approach you? did you write the book then approach publishers? etc etc

congrats again

@utnick -

Thanks! As to your questions: - I've been a lurker in the Rails community ever since it was first released. So no, not active. I guess in that sense I'm doing things backwards. I hope to be active now that I'm not spending all my free time writing and am polishing up an acts_as_rdf plugin for ActiveRecord that I hope will help the semantic web-minded folks.

- I had co-authored another book for Wrox before, so had been emailing back and forth with them afterwards about how important Rails was. That email thread turned into a book proposal.

I can only speak for my own book writing experience with Wiley/Wrox, but it is likely similar across the tech industry. You don't have to write the book up front or get an agent. Instead you submit a proposal to the publisher that is essentially your pitch: it includes a potential table of contents, your own market analysis, and why you think the book is a necessary addition to the existing set of published knowledge.

If all goes well, the proposal turns into a contract, which is basically a 15 page way of saying that you split the copyright, get a royalty advance, and get X% of sales, where X seems to be around 10% for the big publishers. (Pragmatic gives 50%!!).

Then you start the writing process, which took about a year both times for me, divided into ~8 months of writing, ~2 months of editing, and ~1.5 month of last-minute bug fixing and waiting for the book to print.

All in all, it's been simultaneously the hardest and most rewarding thing I've done in my (admittedly short) professional life. If you're interested in more details about how to get your foot in the door, feel free to shoot me an email (edward [dot] benson [at] gmail [dot] com).

Just in case you're asking this to get a wider picture / lots of data points, I wrote "Beginning Ruby" published by Apress and was approached by the publisher, we came up with the idea together, and then got started. There was no real proposal at any point. It is now one of the best selling Ruby books (almost 6000 copies to date - but this is an incredibly tiny niche).

I think 'shameless' would've included nothing about "promotion".. you have a little shame (and thats a good thing)

this might be a good post to ask my related question.

i'm teaching myself ruby on rails. i'm learning ruby by reimplementing some of my c++ classes, and i'm learning rails by ... erm, haven't figured that one out yet.

does anybody know of a project that i could apply myself to? i'm no good at doing tutorials, they bore me to tears. i learn by having a goal to accomplish. but i don't have any really strong ideas about sites i'd like to implement. so i'm willing to work on somebody else's site, for free, just for the experience. who knows what projects would have me?

i just quit my job, i have a lot of money saved up, and i am serious as a heart attack about putting a lot of time and effort into this.

I have a couple of open source Rails projects:

http://rubyforge.org/projects/dedawiki/

http://rubyforge.org/projects/stufftodo/

Or if you want to work on pay sites, email me and we'll see what we can work out.

stufftodo looks interesting. i've got some personal stuff to attend to today, i'll try to get into it tomorrow.

thanks for the links.

So... Where's the pdf link?

Heh - I wish. As far as I know, Wiley (the publisher) doesn't have any plans to do an electronic version.

If it is e-books you're looking for, you should really check out Geoffrey Grosenbach's Peep Code (peepcode.com). It has a collection of screen casts and PDF books that are really great, and cost $9 bucks each, which is far worth the information they contain.

you handsome ruby-hacking devil you

You should have added something about Rails to the subject line; would draw more attention. Nothing wrong with promoting this, and as an intermediate Rails programmer, this may be a book I can use. I'll take a look.