Noel Rappin Writes Here

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I’ll mention somebody else’s book, but don’t worry, I plan on doing it in a totally self-absorbed kind of way. Pragmatic released Using JRuby into beta yesterday, by the core JRuby team. Looks good, interested to see where they go with it.

Because I’m me, I can’t help but compare the structure of the book with the Jython book I did. Biggest structural difference so far is that we were unable to assume a Python-savvy audience, so we felt we had to awkwardly teach Python for 100 pages at the start of the book, where as the JRuby book is able to teach Ruby in an Appendix. Good luck to the JRuby team, and I’m looking forward to seeing this one all the way through.

Book Updates

In the spirit of an old Chevy Chase routine, Rails Test Prescriptions is still on sale. There’s a forum, which is still largely empty – I’d love some feedback.

Worked on the integration and webrat/capybara chapters, cleaning them up for beta 2.

The May, 2010 issue of the PragPub is out with my article about mocking, among other, cooler stuff.

And Then…

Today was a big day for updating software I use every day. If this blog post looks extra-shiny, it’s because I’m using MarsEdit 3, which I’ve used for every blog post I’ve written for several years. New stuff includes a rich text editor and better HTML syntax highlighting.

I also upgrated TextExpander and iStat Menus.

Matt Polito discovered that the Rails 3 API can be found at http://edgeapi.rubyonrails.org/. He did not know this. Neither did I. Neither did you, probably. Now we all know.

You probably do know about Rubular, which is an outstanding online tester for Ruby regular expressions. I just wanted to point out that it’s really cool.

If you aren’t using Dropbox, you should start right now – it’s an outstanding backup tool. (Man, I’m plugging a lot of commercial stuff today for some reason). Anyway, there’s now a Ruby library for the brand-new Dropbox API.

Also from Ruby Inside, a nice overview of three newish date-time libraries. Tickle, in particular, looks handy.

And in Yehuda news, a nice overview of Ruby 1.9 and character encodings, and in a completely different mode, a jQuery plugin for using HTML 5 offline data support.

Finally…

Randall Munroe at XKCD did a big survey asking people to name colors, and the results are really cool.

Will Leitch has a new book about baseball and dads, and this excerpt from Deadspin is all about the famous 2003 Chicago Cubs playoff loss. Since I’m a Cubs fan who loves reliving painful moments, I read it. Leitch gets the flavor of the game down correctly. As a Cubs fan, what I remember most strongly about when that ball dropped, was thinking “Oh, that’s how we’re going to blow this game” – the play was important mostly in getting across the idea that Weird Stuff was afoot.