intertwingly

Time for a fourth printing!  I can confirm that this puts this book comfortably on the left hand side of this pie chart.  Even if you account for the fact that I’m not sole author, so my portion of the royalties are pro-rated.  I have other reasons for liking working with PragProgs, from being able to replicate the build process, to the excellent beta books process, to being able to directly interact with errata, to being able to catch my editor on IM.  I’m sure that no one of those aspects are unique to PragProg, but the entire package as a whole is something that I enjoy.

The fourth edition is coming along, and looks like it will be every bit as much work as the previous edition.  I could save myself some grief by waiting until Rails 3.0 is done, and simply documenting that, but instead I’m participating in the process.  The niche that I have found for myself is system testing... Rails has a substantial number of unit tests, but things like “server won’t start” often aren’t covered by this.  I automated a substantial portion of the scenarios from edition 3, and have been keeping that up to date with Rails 3.0 and Ruby 1.9.2, each of which I extract and build from git and svn multiple times a day.  Meanwhile, I’m continuing to expand the coverage in edition 4.

As a byproduct, I can produce a list of changes to what appears in the printed edition of the book to the latest version of Rails, and will be able to demonstrate how to adapt the scenarios in the third edition with Rails 3.0 when it ships.  My goal with edition 4 is to ship as close as humanly possible to when Rails 3.0 ships, and with code that reflects that release.