davidflanagan.com

Ruby Review Roundup

The Ruby Programming Language has been gratifyingly well received by readers and reviewers. In addition to glowing reviews at rubyinside.com and slashdot.org, it has been reviewed ten times at amazon.com and I proud to say that all ten reviews give it a five-star rating.

Here are the reviews. For all except the slashdot review, the linked text is the title of the review:

• The New Most Important Ruby Book [rubyinside.com]
• ...the most authoritative language book for Ruby... [slashdot.org]
• This is the new authoritative Ruby book. Buy it, not the Pickaxe. [amazon.com]
• Finally! And worth it! [amazon.com]
• A Must-Have For Serious Ruby Developers [amazon.com]
• Perfect For Experienced Ruby Developers [amazon.com]
• Great introduction to Ruby for experienced programmers [amazon.com]
• Good book on Ruby [amazon.com]
• The best Ruby book I've seen [amazon.com]
• The Ruby Book! [amazon.com]
• Great! [amazon.com]
• great book [amazon.com]

Thanks everyone!

Errata for my Ruby Book

I've put together a list of 81 errors and updates to my Ruby book. These are fixed in the next printing. If you already own a copy of the book, however, you can go through and enter the changes yourself, if you are so inclined.

I use O'Reilly's style for describing the changes. Each entry in the file begins with a page number within delimiter characters. The delimiters indicate the severity of the change:

• Page numbers in parentheses usually indicate typos or other minor non-technical changes. You can ignore these if you want.
• Page numbers in curly braces indicate minor technical errors that have been corrected
• Page numbers in square braces indicate more severe technical errors that have been corrected. There are only two of these, but they're worth noting.
• Page numbers in angle brackets are updates (this differs a bit from normal O'Reilly style) to keep the book in sync with the evolution of Ruby 1.9. In my opinion, these are the interesting ones.

I've posted my list of changes here. They will all eventually appear on O'Reilly's errata page for the book as well.

Help fix up my book, please

The Ruby Programming Language is going to be reprinted next week, and O'Reilly has given me SVN write access to the docbook files to fix typos, errors, etc. I've got a list of about 25 relatively minor erros that I'll be fixing, but I'd love to stomp out more bugs on this reprint.

So, if you've got a copy of the book, and have found typos, mistakes or omissions, please let me know. You can email me (david@ this domain) or post them as comments on this blog. (Normally, you'd submit them on the O'Reilly website but since time is factor for this reprint, send them directly to me, please.) Keep in mind that this is just a reprint, not a new edition of the book, so I'm pretty constrained about the kinds of changes I can make. I can't add new sections or figures or tables, or cover brand new topics that aren't currently covered. I can often squeeze in short new paragraphs when they're needed to clarify things or if there is something important that I left out.

Thanks to DH, MD, RM, and DB, all of whom submitted one or more errata to me or to O'Reilly's website recently. I don't have access to the names (or initials) of the others who submitted errata to the publisher's website back in March and February.

Update: Thanks to those (BR, CS, ADS, MD) who commented and emailed me with other errors to correct. I ended up making about 80 changes--half to fix typos and minor errors, and half to update the book to track minor (mostly) changes in Ruby 1.9. I'll post a list of all changes soon.

Will C++ get Closures before Java does?

I just read that closures are being added to C++ [PDF link].

A note to Sun: you know your language is falling embarrassingly behind if the C++ standards committee can move more nimbly than you can!

(For those who aren't already sick of reading about closures in Java, Neal Gafter is developing a prototype Java compiler that supports closures, and he even has a JSR proposal drafted and ready to go.)

5 Years in Iraq

Tomorrow marks the 5th anniversary of Bush's war with Iraq. The costs:

• 3990 US soldiers dead That is more than 2 per day.
• 20,416 US soldiers wounded (badly enough to require air transport). That's more than 11 per day.
• At least 82,240 civilians killed. That's 45 a day and only includes deaths that get reported in the media. One study puts the civilian death toll much, much higher.
• $503 billion. That's 275 million dollars a day, and it doesn't include future obligations, such as veteran's health care. (Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz argues that the war has already cost 3 trillion dollars.)

The blood of 2 soldiers and $275 million down the drain today and tomorrow and the day after.... With no end in sight.

Our elected representatives seem uninterested in stopping this war, but these candidates for the US House of Representatives have a responsible plan to end the war. It is remarkably sane and it is the only glimmer of hope I've had in a long time.

Welcome Slashdot Readers

If you arrived here after reading slashdot's review of The Ruby Programming Language, you've come to the right place. Thanks, Brian, for the kind words! The post below includes links to the book's table of contents and to an interactive preview.

Finally!

The Ruby Programming Language is finally in stock and shipping from online booksellers!

Press Release: actually quite a good overview of the book, who it is for and the niche it hopes to fill.

Preview: an interactive table-of-contents, with excerpts from each chapter and section.

Table of contents (in PDF form)

Buy it from:

• O'Reilly
• Amazon
• Bookpool
• Buy.com
• bn.com

I think (and hope) that this should be my last post flogging this book!

Preview my Ruby book

I've just discovered that the O'Reilly website now displays a browsable table of contents that allows you to preview the start of each chapter and each section of my book.

In other book news, Amazon is still listing the book for pre-order, so I guess the January 24th date isn't quite right.

Update: I received my copy from O'Reilly today, so the book has been printed, and Amazon should be shipping orders soon.

Second Update, (February 1st): Amazon now shows the book available for order, but is saying "two to three weeks" for shipping. The folks in the know at O'Reilly say that books are on their way from the O'Reilly warehouse to the Amazon warehouse, and Amazon should start shipping them out by mid-week. In the meantime, it looks as if oreilly.com is the only place that is currently shipping copies of the book. I was under the mistaken impression that books went directly from the printer to major booksellers like Amazon. Given these normal and predictable shipping delays, I don't know why Amazon listed 1/24 as the availability date for so long.

They still seem to be offering the extra 5% discount. I've also discovered that you can get an even better price on it at buy.com (though they don't have it in stock yet, either).

Finally, the book is available now online (for preview or by subscription) at Safari.