Noel Rappin Writes Here

It’s been quiet on the Rails Test Prescription front. Those of you on the beta program should have gotten Beta 11 earlier this week. There are no major changes in this beta, but it does contain the final copyedit, a pass through the errata, and a couple of late-breaking reviewer comments. At the moment, the book is being typeset, which means that non-typesetter changes to the source files are definitely contraindicated.

So, back in the summer when I started my bizarre quest to edit my book on the iPad, I had three requirements. Be able to read the book files from Dropbox Support for editing HTML/XML files, syntax coloring, extra keys, something like that. TextExpander integration to make it easier to type the markup tags. It quickly became clear that I was the only person in the world looking for this exact set of features.

I’ve been doing a lot more reading on eBooks since I got the iPad. For the most part, I really like it. I’ve been using three different eReader programs: Apple’s iBooks, the Amazon Kindle, and the Barnes & Noble Nook. You’d think that an eReader would be basically similar between apps, but there are definitely differences in how the apps feel. Here’s one little example: how does each reader app marks your progress in the book?

Very quick status update: Rails Test Prescriptions is out of copyedit. It should head for typesetting on Monday for a probably ship date in mid-February. Right now, we’re in the phase where I go over the copyedit and whine about things. Actually, this copyedit has been pretty clean, probably the cleanest I’ve ever had. By way of contrast, when I did the wx book, the copyeditor did not realize that “Python” and “wxPython” were two different things, and decided to unilaterally change all instances of “Python” to “wxPython”, apparently in the belief that I had made the same mistake 1500 times.

Nick Gauthier’s post about mock testing, got some attention and I was kind of opining about it on Twitter, but it’s well over 140 characters, so lucky you, I’ve decided to take it to the blog. (Do read Nick’s post, and then then comments, with Nick and Dave Chelimsky and others discussing the topic.) I want to back up a bit from the “Mock testing is bad for you and hurts puppies” versus the “Mock testing will make your breath fresh and cause you to lose weight” split argument.

This week I did Obtiva’s weekly Geekfest with a presentation/bookreport on the Making Software book. I’ll write more about that book later, right now I want to expand briefly on something I referenced at the end because it’s one of my favorite tech/UI examples to talk about. We were discussing the relationship between an experts gut feeling about what works and what can and can’t be shown using empirical evidence. Specifically, the difference, even for experts, between our perception of our effectiveness and our actual effectiveness.

In the interests of full disclosure, I probably should start by saying that, technically, Rails Test Prescriptions was not actually featured on this week’s MacBreak Weekly. But it is a lot more fun to say that it was… Here’s the whole sordid, somewhat self-indulgent story: I’ve been a regular listener to the MacBreak Weekly podcast almost since it started, and recently I’ve taken to listening to the show while walking to the train but switching to the video version when I get on the train.

We’ve gone through the technical comments for Rails Test Prescriptions and I’ve made the substantial changes that I plan to make. At this point, we are about to enter the production process, we just missed getting it in before the Thanksgiving holiday, so I’d expect this to start next week. I’d also expect beta 10 to come in next week, hopefully Monday, maybe Tuesday. As for the timeline on the rest, I’m not 100% sure.

So. Um. I really didn’t intend to be off the blog for quite this long. But, well, one thing leads to another, and sometimes the easiest thing in the world to do is Not Blog. Some things that are going on: Rails Test Prescriptions is through it’s full technical review. Comments were mostly positive, with a nice dusting of “why didn’t I think of that”, and “Oops”, and “I should fix that”, plus the occasional “We’re just going to have to agree to disagree”.

Book status update The book will be headed out to full text review today. The biggest change of note is that Blue Ridge, which is no longer a supported project, has been replaced as the JavaScript test framework of record by Jasmine. Feels kind of Orwellian to turn Blue Ridge into an unproject like that, but obviously I’d prefer to have living, ongoing projects in the book. The Cucumber and RSpec chapters were also brought in line with the latest versions.