Ruby Best Practices (full book available for download)

http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/posts/gregory/022-rbp-now-open.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RubyBestPractices+%28Ruby+Best+Practices+-+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

by figured • 16 years ago

151 55 16 years ago

blog.rubybestpractices.com

sandal18• 16 years ago

For the tl;dr crowd, this will take you straight to the PDF:

http://sandal.github.com/rbp-book/pdfs/rbp_1-0.pdf

(But please read the article, it provides context :)

ddemchuk• 16 years ago

you provided a tl;dr link to a BOOK???! haha, wednesday morning irony ftw

sandal18• 16 years ago

Hah, the irony here did not escape me. But good point.

So... here's the tl;dr; for the book itself:

"Ruby provides many ways to do things, many of them decent. But some are usually better than others, depending on the context."

onewland• 16 years ago

This looks sweet. Thanks sandal (for writing)/figured (for posting).

bgraves4• 16 years ago

So, is this the full version of the O'Reilly book [1] or something different? I'm curious about the business end of this project: did you sell this PDF before giving it away for free? How much revenue have you brought in? How much time have you spent writing/compiling/editing this book in it's current state. It seems like a very highly regarded book (judging from the Amazon reviews) so perhaps I am just out of the loop on this one, but I find the business aspect of these ventures most interesting.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&tag=mozilla-20&index...

sandal18• 16 years ago

It is exactly what was used to generate the print book, just with some web enabled features like links. And yes, this is the PDF you'd get if you buy it from O'Reilly.

Marketing-wise, it was a gamble, because the open source release date wasn't contingent on sales or anything like that. We launched the book and gave a 9 month exclusive rights period to O'Reilly.

This at least takes into account the fact that most books sell the majority of their copies in the first month or two, but I didn't have like a minimum sales number before I could open source the book or anything like that. In fact, the print book says right in the front cover that it'd be open sourced in March.

The book did okay sales wise, not great, but not horrible. It definitely did worse than it should given that (at least from the looks of it) people really, really like it. But this isn't really up to the readers, it's up to the distributor. Basically, much of our sales come from wholesale, and with paper book stores on the decline, and the saturation of the market with Ruby books over the last couple years, it was hard to convince them to pick up a lot of copies of the book.

As of right now, I am just about at the point of clearing my advance. I will share specific numbers at some point, but let's just say that the advance probably works out to minimum wage or less when compared to the amount of effort put in.

Interestingly enough, the gradual week by week release of chapters really led to a nice spike in sales, coming from what was essentially a steady decline except for a spike around the holidays. So actually, I think open sourcing the book was good for sales in that regard. Since it might be hard to find the book on the shelves in a book store, this gives people a chance to "try before they buy".

Unfortunately, because my book was selling above average as an ebook, I've probably effectively killed those sales today. Then again, maybe people will still buy the Kindle and Iphone editions, who knows.

At the end of the day, I think neither O'Reilly nor myself expected this book to be a big bread winner. I love the book because it embodies the most interesting things I've learned from the smartest people I know, and I think that comes through in the writing. I wrote the book because the idea popped into my head fully formed and demanded to be put out on paper. So that was my biggest win.

But from an authors perspective, RBP has given me a great boost in exposure. I already had name recognition in the inner circles of Ruby community, but after writing the book, I find more opportunities from folks I probably wouldn't have been able to reach otherwise. This has been good for my open source projects, and good for my work.

I'm glad I did this, and it worked out well. I'd recommend it to others, for sure. Of course, buying the book will make O'Reilly happy, so go ahead and do that if you want :)

jamesbritt9• 16 years ago

It's quite a risk to open up a book like this. More so if the main sales are expected to be E-versions.

I've talked to a few people who did things along this line, and they are of two minds. One camp says it kills sales. The other says it boosts sales, but in the latter case I don't think there was a PDF version even offered, and they made the book available as a Web site.

I encourage people who think this book is valuable to pay for it in some form, to encourage publishers to do more of the same, and to reward the author.

bgraves4• 16 years ago

Thank you for the details! Much appreciated.

Even though you may not have been paid a "fair wage" for the work that you put into this book, it sounds like you are very happy with the outcome and the experience and the future benefits that you will undoubtedly reap from this project.

Congratulations and thanks again!

jamesbritt9• 16 years ago

BTW, people should Google around for Gregory Brown's conference videos to hear him talk about, and demonstrate, assorted instances of good and bad code.

revorad2• 16 years ago

Hey Gregory, thanks a lot for sharing your experience and of course for the book itself. I'm just beginning to write an R graphs cookbook. Do you have any tips for a first time author?

figured• 16 years ago

I recommend this book whole heartily. I have been reading the chapters as they have been released, an excellent resource.

jamesbritt9• 16 years ago

Sweet! Thanks, Greg.

richcollins10• 16 years ago

Keyword arguments via hashes is certainly not a best practice for "Beautiful API Design". Sending messages is part and parcel to good OO design. Code that deconstructs hashes to emulate keyword arguments is invariably hideously complicated.

lg2• 16 years ago

Would you prefer a *rest argument? An options hash is the best way to make your ruby API flexible.

richcollins10• 16 years ago

Plain old objects are the best way to make your API design flexible. You can't easily change the behavior of setting a key/value pair for an individual hash. Objects are designed to implement behavior, Hashs are meant to hold key value pairs.

sandal18• 16 years ago

I agree with you from a language design standpoint, but seriously, I doubt you have much Ruby experience if you're saying this. And if that's the case, you really don't have a basis to be commenting on my book in such a critical and dismissive way.

Using positional arguments for more than two or so things creates connascence of position, which quickly becomes annoying.

Using block based DSLs so that you can break things down into small functions that each do their part is a good way around this, but these tend to be hard to extend dynamically.

Typically well designed Ruby systems provide both: Pseudo keyword arguments for dynamic needs, and some DSL-type syntax for pleasing the eyes.

Yes, it sucks that we don't have real keyword arguments. But no, it's not nearly as bad as you think.

richcollins10• 16 years ago

I've been using Ruby since 2005 and I am a top 100 contributor to Rails (http://contributors.rubyonrails.org/). Rails design suffers for its heavy use of "keyword arguments".

positional arguments for more than two or so things creates connascence of position

Which is precisely the reason that you shouldn't pass more than two arguments to a method (unless you are creating a list or hash for their intended purpose). If you have more than two arguments to a method, it's a sign that you should reify them into an object.

Using block based DSLs so that you can break things down into small functions that each do their part is a good way around this

Why do people love making things complicated by misusing blocks. Just create an object and set slots on it. Blocks are best used for delaying computation, not setting up state.

I think that Zed Shaw's essay on the "Master" and the "Expert" is applicable here: http://www.zedshaw.com/essays/master_and_expert.html

daveungerer• 16 years ago

The sandal username on GitHub sounded familiar, so I checked and realised its the same sandal that does the Prawn PDF library: http://github.com/sandal/prawn

That gives the book some extra credibility in my eyes.

EDIT: OK, now that I've read the foreward, I see Matz himself mentions Gregory's work on Prawn. Doh.

sandal18• 16 years ago

Yes, I started Prawn via the "Ruby Mendicant" project: http://majesticseacreature.com/mendicant/

I'm still active in the project as a maintainer. But really, these days you have Brad Ediger, James Healy, and Daniel Nelson, along with about 60+ contributors to thank for where Prawn is heading.

My job is mostly to sit around naming things, and warning people about the fragility of the early code I wrote. But we will have a 1.0 plan soon, and no matter who does the work, that'll be good for everybody.

erikpukinskis• 16 years ago

Here's a copy on Google Docs. I hate PDFs:

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B8mB_WI1jRkCMzgyZWY5MzY...

sandal18• 16 years ago

I'll run the book through asciidoc's html generator soon enough, but thanks for doing this for now.

Looks like it loses some quality on translation to Google docs, though...

Pistos2• 16 years ago

Thank you for writing this, and thanks for open sourcing it.

sandal18• 16 years ago

The Ruby community has taught me so much, it seems the reasonable thing to do. Also, old books tend to go out of print, and then die sad, lonely out-of-date deaths.

Maybe this will keep RBP moving forward, and keep it alive.

sandal18• 16 years ago

BTW, going to experiment with using a wiki page for collecting reader questions. Once I have a few lined up, I'll cut a blog post reply on the RBP blog.

http://wiki.github.com/sandal/rbp-book/questions-for-gregory

Ruby Best Practices (full book available for download)

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