Noel Rappin Writes Here

Here’s where we are in the publishing cycle of Rails Test Prescriptions:

The book went through a major hurdle in December when it went through “Publisher review”, where three chapters were submitted to Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt for review. Dave and Andy, thankfully, said mostly good things, asked for a few revisions, and caught some relatively minor technical issues. (I suspect the major technical issues are in a later chapter…).

Anyway, the next task is to prepare the first half of the book for an external review, and we’re hoping to get that out within the next couple weeks. The book has a new intro chapter, which will introduce the world to the fable of Bert and Ernie, two programmers, only one of whom writes tests (Spoiler: it ends badly for the other one). The tutorial (formerly the free chapter) has been rejiggered a bit, to use a technical term. We’ve reorganized the chapters to make a lot more sense, and some of the shorter chapters in the self-published version have been combined or absorbed into other chapters.

What’s left? At least one round of external review. Technical clean up of everything – some of the tools have moved forward pretty quickly since I did the original write-up (I’m looking at you, Cucumber). I have two or maybe three more chapters I’d like to write. I expect that Rails 3 will require some changes to code samples, although it doesn’t seem like the test features have changed substantially.

Exactly where in that sequence the book will go on sale as a Beta/PDF hasn’t been decided. I suspect it’ll depend on what happens in the review.

In a related story, sometime in the next couple of weeks, the railsrx.com domain will redirect to here along with a version of the free book that links to the eventual Pragmatic version. That site was basically the marketing site for the self-published version of the book and I haven’t updated it in some time. In fact, I still get an email every couple of weeks asking why the Lulu.com link doesn’t work – which, I stress, is totally my fault for leaving the link there in the first place. In any case, the current host has asked me to move on, and I’ll add the information material here. Not sure what I’m going to do with the blog posts from there.