Chad Perrin wrote: > On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 08:31:54AM +0900, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: >> John Joyce wrote: >>> Far better suggestion is what topics to write books and chapters about! >>> >>> I suggest a GUI focused Ruby book that covers Qt, Tk, Wx, etc... >>> A game / graphics focused Ruby book... (could easily be integrated or >>> connected with the GUI book) >>> A whole host of Ruby topics could be entire books based on one or two >>> classes or modules or gems. >>> What we have enough of are books that are broad but not deep. >>> As an example: Pro ActiveRecord is a nice one, but an Expert >>> ActiveRecord would be better... >>> >>> Lots of topics to suggest. >> Agreed ... then again, there are some other good books that don't even >> exist: >> >> "Up and Running with Nitro and Og" >> "Up and Running with Iowa" >> "Pragmatic RSpec" (although I hear that's due in beta by the end of the >> year) >> "ZenTest and Heckle Primer" >> "Selenium ..." >> "Watir ..." >> "Cerberus ..." >> >> There are some things Ruby has -- like Rails, Nitro, Iowa, RSpec, >> ZenTest, Heckle and many others -- that don't exist in the Perl world. >> So you can't say, as you can with Ruby/Tk, "Go learn from the O'Reilly >> Perl/Tk book and just translate the syntax from Perl to Ruby and you'll >> be on the air". >> >> I think the real problem is not that every book on Ruby tells you how to >> install it. The real problem is that there doesn't seem to be an actual >> paid market for much beyond books about Rails and core Ruby. The other >> good stuff, like the things I've listed above, just isn't getting seen. >> >> Then again, as a potential author, I'm not going to spend any time >> writing about things I don't use. So don't look to me for a Nitro or >> Iowa book, or a book about everything you wanted to know about Ruby on >> Windows systems. :) > > Actually, as a first step in that direction a "common useful libraries" > book -- perhaps called "prospecting for gems", or something cleverer -- > would be excellent. I don't mean a listing: I mean an honest-to-goodness > tutorial/primer on a bunch of great libraries/modules for common tasks. > I can do "gem list --remote" and get a listing of the gems and brief descriptions -- good enough to tell me whether I want to learn about them or not. And as far as "common tasks" are concerned, I think that's covered adequately by "The Ruby Way" and "Ruby Cookbook". What *I* want is a book on Cerberus, a book on RSpec, a book on Selenium, Watir/Firewatir, etc. I know *what* these things can do, and I want to know how to get started doing them without having to decode RDoc and ri files!