Entries Tagged 'Books' ↓

This is obviously not my first time that I have shilled the PeepCode website. I truly think that for any Rails developer, this is one of the most invaluable tools for learning available anywhere. I’ve purchased many of their screencasts already, and once I get the opportunity, I’ll even spring for their PeepCode Unlimited subscription. I know I will fully get my money’s worth.

If you haven’t been following what they have been doing recently, they have also added PDF books to the mix. These books provide a lot of wealth, just like their screencasts, but only in text form, perfect for printing or, for the environmentally-conscious of you, just keeping in your flash drive and reading it whenever you need it. I just recently purchased two of their PDF books: Git Internals and ActiveMerchant.

I purchased the Git Internals book to satisfy my own curiosity. As many of you should know by now, Git is a distributed version control system (a la Subversion) that’s taking the software development world by storm. I’m slowly getting into Git, thanks to a PeepCode screencast on the basics of Git, and even decided to pay for an account on GitHub (which I will write about in the near future). But I’m usually not content to just know how to get my work done. I like exploring beyond that, knowing how it actually works in the inside. Most of the times, I fully understand its strengths (and weaknesses - nothing is perfect!), making me more efficient. This PDF book does exactly that. If you’re a curious being, and are using (or planning to use) Git, I wholly recommend this book.

The ActiveMerchant book, I actually bought out of necessity. The web application I’m working on has the ActiveMerchant Plugin installed, and some work with that plugin done. However, since the developers who implemented those features aren’t working for the company anymore, and some core functionality has changed since I’ve arrived, it needs to be changed. I didn’t want to start from scratch, so I bought this PDF book to see what should be the “right way” (as per the author, who undoubtedly has tons more experience with the plugin as I have). I really got into this book, because it’s really, really easy to understand (thanks to the plugin actually being easy to implement) and it explains everything you need to know about the entire payment process. This is a must-read for anyone who’s building Rails applications where money needs to get to you.

The guys over at PeepCode are doing an excellent job, so why don’t you head over to their site and check them out? If you’re a web developer, particularly using Ruby and Rails, you’ll definitely find something interesting, or even necessary.

If there’s one positive thing I can take out of having to ride the subway to work for one hour each way every single day, it’s that I’ve been able to catch up on a lot of reading. I love to read a whole lot, particularly about technology. So lately I’ve been able to finish a couple of books I had around, plus I’ve been able to afford more books to read, so I’ve been buying more. While I haven’t read a library’s worth of books, I think I’ve read more than the average software developer has read. I would go into a long discussion about that fact, but maybe another day.

With a myriad of books out there, it’s difficult to know which ones to read. I first got inspired by Jeff Atwood’s Recommended Reading For Developers list. Since then I’ve purchased and read many of the books Jeff recommends, which are still pretty relevant and really good reads.

So I decided to dedicate some time to write some mini-reviews about the books I’ve read, in case someone wants an honest opinion on them from my perspective. I’ve already written about a couple of books before (like the upcoming Advanced Rails Recipes book, and my not-so-popular opinion about The Pickaxe Book), so I hope to expand on that.

Also, I added a nifty text widget on my sidebar which I will update constantly on which books I’m currently reading and into, with a link to Amazon (no referral link!) for more information. I hope you all find it interesting to see where I’m focusing now.

Any suggestions on recommended reading for a software developer like me? While I like programming-specific books, I would really like to get into more books that focus not on one single piece of technology, but as a whole. Any recommendations will definitely be appreciated.

Well, well, even a week after Zed Shaw’s infamous rant on the Ruby and Rails communities, all the talk generated by it continues. While it has died down enough, I feel that the repercussions of the rant are still going on. And I’ll be writing about one I’ve been disturbingly seen more and more in the past week.

One of Zed’s problems with Dave Thomas was due to his book, Programming Ruby (or “Pickaxe” - weird how some people know that book only by the Pickaxe name). Here’s one of the paragraphs he wrote about that particular book:

That’s right, take a look at the original topics and you’ll see that Dave’s book is nothing but a giant me-too book that seems to appeal to the average OOP coder of 2001. However, the average OOP coder using Java, C++, or C# wasn’t doing much meta-programming then, and what Dave presented was nothing more than a book that said, “Hey look, you can do all the stuff you’re doing now, and make NO money at it.”

He goes on to explain a lot of the shortcomings of the book, like the fact that the chapter about classes was demonstrated by designing some sort of Karaoke jukebox machine. I do agree with these specific points Zed makes. I remember reading the book for the first time, and just skimming the classes chapter because it felt awkward that these very important terms were being explained this way. It was also confusing as well. I just read the basics (how to create classes, inheritance, access control, etc.) and skipped most of it. Also, failing to include one of Ruby’s strong suits (which is the ease of meta-programming in this particular programming language) seems very weird.

However, this isn’t what I wanted to talk about. My issue is that after Zed pointed these things out in his rant, I’ve been seeing a lot of negative comments towards this book - something I hadn’t encountered before. In fact, I bought this book because everywhere I read on the Internet, it specified that this was the book to own on Ruby. In fact, let me show you a screenshot of the current reviews this book has on Amazon.com:

See anything interesting there? Yeah, there are only 52 reviews, but 43 of those reviewers - a whopping 82.6% - gave this book either four or five stars. To me, for a supposedly “shitty” book (as I’ve read a lot of people call this book in the past week), this is a rather high positive rating.

So, are these people honestly criticizing the book by their own will, or simply just want to “follow the leader” and bash Dave’s book without thinking for themselves? I find it extremely odd that a lot of criticism is aimed towards this book in such a short period of time - the past week since Zed’s rant. Were people scared or something of giving their honest take on this book for fear that the Ruby zealots would find out where he/she lived and crucify them or something? Something just doesn’t seem right.

Now, while I’ve expressed before how much I enjoy the work of Dave Thomas and others who publish the Pragmatic Programmers books, do know that I’m not biased in any way, shape or form. I’m probably one of the most objective guys you’ll ever meet. If I think something sucks, I’ll gladly say so, as long as I can back my words up. But honestly, I don’t think the Pickaxe book sucks. Far from it. This book has helped many (myself included) find out about the awesome features of Ruby (well, most of them, at least). To ignore the fact that this book helped jump-start Ruby usage in the in the Western Hemisphere is really a disservice to it.

I think Programming Ruby is an awesome book and an excellent reference to the Ruby language. As a book to learn the language, I wouldn’t count on it to be the “be all to end all” Ruby book. To those who think there are programming books like this, you’re totally wrong. In my short programming career, I’ve come to know that one book for a specific language or technology isn’t enough. Obviously, that doesn’t mean you should buy all the books on a particular topic. But more than one, at most two or three books, should help you greatly. No two authors think alike, and there’s always some stuff missing from one book that another has, and vice versa.

So to all those newly-minted Pickaxe “haters”, I suggest you take an honest look at yourself and think if you’re really hating this book because you didn’t like it. If you didn’t like it from the get-go, good for you. I hope you find another book that helps you learn Ruby. But leave the rest of us who learned a great deal from this book alone. We don’t need a Zed-wannabe running around this joint.

UPDATE: After I posted this, I immediately E-Mailed David Heinemeier Hansson (yes, the creator of Rails), because I was curious on how he learned the Ruby language. I was surprised he responded in mere minutes, and his response was even more surprising:

I learned Ruby in large parts from the original Pickaxe and thought it was a great book. No, it didn't cover everything. And I picked up some metaprogramming tricks form The Ruby Way, especially Chapter 5, as well. But I was very happy to have it at the time.

Seems like David agrees with my thoughts on this subject. I bet that most of the big names in the Ruby world also learned the language from Dave’s book. I thank David for that quick and honest response.

Like I mentioned a while back in this blog, I really like the books released by The Pragmatic Programmers. They’re pretty easy to read and teach a lot in the process. Although Programming Ruby (known to many on as the ‘Pickaxe’ book) is getting some flak after Zed Shaw’s take on it (which I agree on, although I’ll give my own take on it in the near future), you can’t deny their books are among the best in their specific topics.

I’m a big fan of the Rails Recipes book (and no, it’s not because they actually put a pilón, a typical Puerto Rican food prep utensil, on the cover). When you learn a specific technology, be it a programming language, database engine, framework, or anything else, you’ll want to find some real-world usage to apply what you’ve learned. Books like Rails Recipes give you an entire list of specific things you probably thought of doing for your own application, but didn’t know how to exactly do it. It’s a great tool when you’re developing your own stuff.

Of course, thanks to the speed of Rails, that book is a bit outdated. So I was really psyched that a new version, named Advanced Rails Recipes, was going to be released in March 2008. So psyched, that I actually went over to their site and purchased the beta PDF (and, of course, I’ll be getting the paper book wne it’s released). I couldn’t wait to read it and apply some recipes to my current projects.

First, I would like to discuss the current system that’s used for beta PDF’s in the Pragmatic Programmers site. The site is relatively easy to use, and really well done. Once I created an account and purchased the PDF and paper book, I received an E-Mail stating that my PDF was ready to be downloaded. That was it. Withing a few minutes, I already had my PDF, with “This book was prepared exclusively for Dennis Martinez” in the cover - neato! A couple of days passed by, and I received an E-Mail stating that the beta PDF was updated. All I needed to do was to go into my account on their site, and a link immediately appeared in the main page, which took me directly where to regenerate the PDF (which apparently is run by gerbils - no joke!). A few minutes passed, and the gerbils sent an E-Mail with a link to my updated PDF. Okay, so they might not really be gerbils who work on the PDF’s, but I really like it when companies go with these informal jokes while still be very helpful. Kudos to these guys for making a very user-friendly site.

This book is filled with recipes from various Rails users all around the globe who have contributed their work to this book. One thing that took me by surprise is the fact that I expected this book to be pretty much incomplete, with tons of errors all around, but it really wasn’t like that at all. I found one or two spelling errors, and the recipes I tried worked straight out of the box. That’s a great thing, because this is why I went ahead and purchased the book three months in advance. I wanted to read up on the techniques used by people with much more real-world Rails experience than I.

In particular, I wanted to read up on the chapter about Capistrano and deployments. This, to me, is one of the most touchy issues in Rails nowadays. It’s something that everyone seems to do differently with mixed results. The recipes included here aren’t de-facto deployment strategies, but nice techniques, such as how to generate config files on the fly when deploying to a remote server, how to safeguard your database passwords so that they’re not in your source code repository, and many other techniques.

Sure, most of these recipes are readily available on the Internet, if you search hard enough. But when you’re developing a major web application, the last thing you want to do is to fire up Google and spend the next 15+ minutes searching and trying out pieces of code to see if they work for you. This book avoids all that. Not only does it show you how to do things, it also explains why and when you should use them.

Major kudos to the author, Mike Clark, for making such an awesome book. Even though it’s still in beta, I really recommend this book to anyone who wants to expand their Rails knowledge with bits and pieces of information from major Rails players. Once the ‘full release’ of the book is out in March, I’ll make sure to do a more informative review. For now, don’t be afraid to get this book because it’s tagged as ‘Beta’. That’s far from the truth, it seems.