Noel Rappin Writes Here

Book Status Editing the RSpec chapter, which I expect to be done today, it’s all done except for a couple of hard questions from the editor which last-night me decided to leave for this-morning me, so that last-night me could finish Mockingjay. Thanks, last-night me! A Bundler Question I’m not sure whether this is a feature-request or an I-don’t know what I’m doing request. I’ve been using Bundler with a Rails 2.

Top Story As you probably know, both Rails 3 and Bundler went final over the weekend. The Rails 3 release notes are up, as well as extensive coverage on the Rails Guides page. I’ll also mention Jeremy McAnally’s Rails 3 Upgrade handbookhttp, and Gregg Pollack’s list of great Rails 3 documentation sources. And, just for the hell of it, here’s the post I wrote back when Rails 3 was first announced.

I always feel a little bad for the people who come to this site via search. There aren’t very many of them, mind you, but it always feels like they are destined to be disappointed if they are coming here to actually get information. In that sprit, I’m going to respond to some of the search terms that WordPress says have brought people to this site in the last 48 hours.

Book Status RSpec chapter draft handed in to edit. It’s going to need a better conclusion. A lot changed in this one, relative to the Lulu version – this is probably the chapter most affected by my own personal experience since it’s original version. Links Haven’t done a link set in a while, this is going to be kind of random. Still seats available for both WindyCityRails in general, and for my tutorial in specific.

It’s very easy to let this blog habit slip through your fingers. You go from, “put something up every weekday”, to “nobody reads this on Friday”, to “I’m tired this mornng”, to “wow, I haven’t posted in a week, and nobody noticed, why post today”. Anyway, here’s a post. Book Status Beta 6 came out last week. I’m now going through the RSpec chapter, which is taking longer than I thought.

I have something like eight different apps on my iPad which are text editors or note takers of one form or another. Plus I know of at least one more that I’m waiting for. It’s possible I have a problem. I really want to be able to use my iPad as a writing tool – the best apps are super responsive, and I like the ergonomics of using it with the Bluetooth keyboard.

Book Status Beta 6 is out and available for sale here. The major addition is the new Shoulda chapter. It’s also available from Amazon. Note that the ship date for the print book seems to have moved to November. Next up is the RSpec chapter, which will probably be Beta 7 sometime in the next week to ten days. After that, most likely a new chapter on test performance / performance testing.

Here’s something I haven’t done in a while – a genuine code blog entry. I needed to add a simple CSV file output, here’s how I did it, tests and all. I used two gems, FasterCSV, which I assume that most of you are familiar with, and Comma, which is a nice little DSL for specifying CSV formats. (Thanks again to Jason Pearl for reminding me what the gem was called…).

In case I don’t get to a longer post today, just a quick book status note. The Shoulda chapter is essentially done, I’ve cleared the errata that people found (some really good catches this time…) It will go out as Beta 6 probably on Monday, although we might get lucky and get it out sooner.

Book Status Shoulda chapter fixes made. The next decision is whether to push that as a beta by itself, or wait until the RSpec chapter is also done. Also Today is the last day to get early bird pricing for WindyCityRails. Book Status I did not know that Ruby 1.9 had its own coverage tool. Aaron Patterson shows how to use that tool and a little code to create useful output for coverage testing.

Book Status The Shoulda chapter is draft complete, after a slight restructuring to change the emphasis of the chapter, and a lot of syntax changes. My previous version of the chapter was written before Shoulda went in the direction of RSpec compatibility and so there were a lot of syntax changes that needed to be made, particularly to the way you create Shoulda extensions, which used to be much simpler.

Book Satus Still patching the Shoulda chapter together. Realized yesterday that Machinist is in the middle of a version 2 upgrade, which, along with some factory_girl changes probably means I have some tweaking to do in that chapter. I haven’t run the buy links in a while. You can get the beta ebook and pre-order from Pragmatic and the book is also available from Amazon. WindyCityRails Early Bird pricing for WindyCityRails is scheduled to end today.

Book Status Spent yesterday’s book time rearranging the Shoulda chapter so as to be more focused on the general ideas than the specific Shoulda interpretation. Today’s job is making sure it all still flows. Links So I have something like a half-dozen half-finished blog posts. Until the day some of those become fully finished, here’s a few links. Simone Carletti has list of practices to follow in your Rails 2.3 app to make it more compatible for an eventual upgrade to Rails 3.

While I’m commemorating anniversaries this summer, I just remembered another one. Ten years ago this summer was when I first read the original Kent Beck “white book”, Extreme Programming Explained, which is one of only a couple of books that completely changed the way I approach whatever it is that I do. Considering that I’ve spent most of the last ten years practicing, advocating for, and writing about XP and Agile development, it’s not an overstatement to say that Kent’s book, and the ideas about how to be a professional programmer, changed my professional life.