Links for 2006-08-09
- I note there's a new edition of Agile Web Development with Rails coming out sometime in the next couple of months... Unfortunately I can't find it on Amazon. Am I missing something? Does anyone know the precise date that it's going to be published? And more to the point - has anyone looked at the alpha PDF and what that's like?
- I notice that Chris Messina survived a vote for deletion on Wikipedia Particularly liked the discussion of whether to merge him with Bar Camp and the line, "Tara Hunt should also be considered for merging".
- Mint Digital has explored in some research sessions how British teenagers are using MySpace Interesting responses - I wonder if they're representative...
- The use of gay issues as a wedge in the south of the US is causing gay people to move away No doubt the Bible belt are delighted. But they shouldn't be - there's some evidence that a region's prosperity correlates well with the presence of gay communities. We're like canaries down mines in the North of England...
- Simon's put together a Python Development Centre for the Yahoo! Developer Network You go on holiday for a couple of weeks and he decides to get all productive. I should go on holiday more often.
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
I'm a Rails learner, and having got frustrated with the 1st Edition of the Agile book - because it was so out-of-date – I'm having much more luck with learning from the beta version of the second. It's updated some crucial stuff (but there are still errors and omissions). Looking forward to the hard copy.
→ Posted by: Virginia at August 9, 2006 1:35 AM
As far as the new Rails book is concerned, it pretty much rocks. The more advanced chapters aren't complete in the version I have right now, but many of the bits added to Rails since the first edition are covered quite well.
Not sure when a physical copy will be available on Amazon and similar, but you can get the not-quite-done PDF immediately from the publisher directly.
→ Posted by: Patrick Byrne at August 9, 2006 1:57 AM
The new version of the Agile Rails book probably won't show up on Amazon for a while. If you're going to order it, I'd just get it straight from the Pragmatic folks. I bought the hardcopy of the 1st edition, but have bought the PDF of the 2nd, and so far the latest revision seems really close to being finished. They seem to release an update to the PDF every couple of weeks.
→ Posted by: Bill at August 9, 2006 2:55 AM
I've got the alpha versions of the PDF, and the changes are pretty substantial. It does change about once a month.
I'd also suggest just buying the PDF of the 2nd Ed now directly from the Pragmatic site.
BTW, another really useful and cheap resource is O'Reilley's "RJS Templates for Rails" for about $9US, which covers Rails' support for Ajax:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/rjsrails/
→ Posted by: Andrew at August 9, 2006 4:13 AM