Um, Hi? My book is out.
When I say that I’m really bad at self-marketing, one of the things that I mean is that I’ve left this blog basically dark for almost a month. This was an especially good idea because a) the TextMate post on Feb 10 became the most read post on this site ever by a factor of 5 over the previous three most popular posts (the PeepOpen review, the iaWriter review, and the thing about writing bad code, in case you care), and b) my book actually came out in print during this time.
So, obviously that’s a good time for complete radio silence. Sigh.
Book Thing
I should mention that there’s going to be a signing/event at Obtiva HQ on Tuesday, March 8th. We’re going to be giving away about 25 copies, and if there are more people than that, we’ll be selling copies at what I assume will be a discount of the cover price. There will also be food. If you are in the neighborhood stop by, because otherwise this will be depressing, and I’d really prefer it be fun.
PragPub
I have an article in this month’s PragPub about testing against web services. It’s 100% all-new material, none of it is in the book, and I kind of like it, even though I didn’t know about the vcr gem that works with webmock to automate creating good test data.
The Book is out
I have a half-written, somewhat indulgent post on Rails Test Prescriptions being out that might go up someday soon. In the meantime, the book is out, a physical object that you can hold, write in the margins, buy from Amazon, and so on.
People ask me how it’s selling, and I honestly don’t know how to answer, because I don’t really have any expectations – only a few technical books sell what you might think of as objectively a lot of copies. It’s sold far better than the Lulu version did, and it either has already or will soon outsell my Wrox book. (I literally have no idea how many copies the Wrox book sold because the only statement I saw was immediately after the book came out.) The people who have bought have said nice things, and that’s really the best part.