May 11, 2010: Beta 2 Is Out
Top Story / Book Update
Beta 2 of Rails Test Prescriptions is out. The biggest addition is the chapters on integration testing and Webrat/Capybara. Beta 3 will be coming next week and will include all or most of the Cucumber chapter.
Please do post to the forum, there’s not any discussion there, and I’m interested to hear any questions or comments you might have.
Other People’s Books
A lot of book links today.
SF writer Charles Stross has been writing some brilliant stuff about publishing, including making a great deal of sense about ebooks. One big takeaway, in case you haven’t noticed, just because they are digital, doesn’t mean the price of books is going to drop dramatically.
Speaking of ebooks. Cory Doctorow’s new book, For The Win, is out today. Say what you will about Cory, he’s become a fantastic novelist, and he walks the walk. For The Win is available for free download on Cory’s site.
And, hey, speaking of ebooks, Lulu announced that they will allow their books to be published to the Apple iBooks store, which is great, because the iBooks store could use the stuff on the shelves.
Twitteriffic developer Craig Hockenberry asked for some books for people to get started with programming, specifically for people hoping to get started in on the iPhone.
And Then
This page is based on a stack overflow question for new programming jargon. You may recognize your team here…
Here’s one Rails developer who has moved to the Smalltalk Seaside framework, and why. Seaside was commonly mentioned in the Rails community a year or so ago, but I haven’t heard much about it since.
Mathias Meyer says that ActiveRecord callbacks ruined his life.
And, NoSql is apparently here to stay. If only we could get rid of the name.
This looks like a good reference to possible XSS attack vectors in HTML 5.
Finally
Jakob Nielsen has come out with the first serious user testing of iPad apps. The executive summary is basically that individual apps are inconsistent, and that is frustrating. Also, many content apps are too wedded to a print mentality. This research seems to have largely been based on content-heavy apps and websites, so I’m not sure it generalizes to, say, Omnigraffle, but it’s worth looking at.