Currently online O’Reilly is selling the rough cuts version (basically the beta version) of the Ruby Cookbook. It’s a pleasure to see that many good books about Ruby are being published.
This book authored by Leonard Richardson and Lucas Carlson is particularly special to me. In fact, I have contributed to the book with three recipes and related full-length explanations. My recipes are about using RMagick to achieve common image manipulation tasks, as I love photography and I like RMagick a lot!
The recipes are Thumbnailing Images, Adding Text to an Image and Converting Among Image Formats. While these tasks are quite easy to achieve thanks to Tim Hunter’s library, I tried to go the extra mile and provide a good sort of introduction to the library, within the limits of the problem/solution framework of these kind of books.
It’s my first contribution to an O’Reilly book and I’m humbly proud of it. I look at it as a stepping stone until the day when I’ll publish my own book about Ruby 🙂
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hey congrats for the inclusions 🙂
Thr ruby cookbook sounds interesting, at least looking tat the existint TOC.
Even if I think that building it like the python one (i.e. let the community post lots of recipes than just choose them) would have been more interesting and useful.
it’s too bad the quality of the rough cut is so poor — I really wanted this
to be something worth getting.
In answer to the anonymous comment, I’d like to say that the rough cuts are not to be benchmarked against the final product. The whole idea is to involve the reader more in the evolution process leading up to the release of the final product. As O’Reilly says on their site: “You can read it online, download as a PDF, or print. Once you’ve purchased a Rough Cuts title, you have a chance to shape the final product – you can send suggestions, bug fixes, and comments directly to the author and editors.”
Thanks, I appreciate your post.
Antonio
PS: Thanks for your comment too, Gabriele.
“Once you’ve purchased a Rough Cuts title, you have a chance to shape the final product – you can send suggestions, bug fixes, and comments directly to the author and editors.”
What’s somewhat dissappointing about this approach is that one has to commit to a purchase before one can participate in the betterment of the book (of which there is no assurance ). Seems that the quality would go up much more if the beta were free until publication. But I gather there are whatever concerns that giving stuff away like that eats sales.
Unless you’re Bruce Eckel or Peter Seibel or David B. Lamkins.
I have to concur with James here: The rough cuts program is a great idea, and I would love to be involved in shaping the final product. However, O’Reilly is effectively penalizing those who would like to be involved by making them pay (significantly) more for the beta PDF + hardcopy then just buying the hardcopy alone. If you have to pay up-front to be involved, it should at least not cost more than the final book.
I agree with you guys, it would be nice to see a more “Open Source” approach to book publishing. Take “Learning Programming with Ruby” for example, the main reason why it’s a great book for newbies is the huge amount of feedback Chris Pine has got from the community. In a way the online readers have completely shaped the published book.
When I’ll write my own guide or book, I’d love to use this publishing method where the “beta” is freely available on my website.
I appreciate your comments.
Antonio
Didn’t actually look into this one, but also check out http://pleac.sf.net and http://bigbold.com/snippets/ for some useful Ruby code!