RubyDC

Life is short, proclaims the authors of O'Reilly's Ruby Cookbook. You have real problems and this book is here to solve them, they go on. Weighing in at around 850 pages, there certainly is a chance that what ever problem you have could be addressed in this book. But is it all cartoon foxes or a tale with descriptions and plot twists worthy of reading in your bathrobe over a cup of chamomile? Thankfully no. In this book, O'Reilly delivers a densely packed tome filled with information, most of it unrelated, intended to solving real problems. Read on for my full review...

[From Carter's Blog]

I was recently provided with a PDF copy of Ruby on Rails – Up and Running by the Adams Morgan Ruby Users Group. As you can imagine, books on Ruby (and Rails) are about to flood the shelves as the publishing industry gets on the RoR bandwagon. I wanted to see how well a book could cover the fast-moving framework and in what ways it could improve my understanding of Rails.

The book is organized around creating a photo sharing web application step-by-step. Off the bat, I was puzzled to see “Installing Rails” as the last chapter in the book. Having a working runtime enhances the value of the book to the reader. On the flip side, I was pleased to see Mongrel mentioned as one of the web servers available for Rails development, a sign of the freshness of the content.

The authors develop the application from the ground up, tying general concepts (MVC, relational data, etc) into their Rails counterparts (ActiveRecord, etc). Explanations for certain design decisions (how ActiveRecord eschews mapping in favor of wrapping) are sprinkled through-out the book and provide an increasing sense of confidence in the framework.

Beyond the basic controllers, models and views, the authors provide details on enhancing their application with some judicious use of AJAX. They tie-up the development of the Photo Share application with an overview of the Rails testing framework, explaining the importance and ease of automated testing.

Overall, I give the book high marks. The book is excellent for anyone just getting into Rails development or looking for and end-to-end overview of the framework. The level of detail is limited, given the book’s 189 pages, so experienced developers may have less to gain. You will not read anything about RESTful Rails. It should also be noted that this book is focused on Rails, not Ruby, and contains little insight into the language.

I do support for a research company that collects large amounts of data, analyzes it, and publishes it each year. In the course of a year, we'll produce thousands of standardized data-driven profiles of companies and countries. So why do I care about InDesign? Well, we like our profiles to look pretty.

Turns out though, that out of the box, InDesign isn't the best for repetitive tasks. Of course, InDesign and indeed all Desktop Publishing applications have template and styling systems, and for the vast majority of problems these are sufficient. However, knowing how to effectively use an application's scripting framework adds extensively to the overall value and opens vast new realms of possibilities. More importantly, this knowledge can allow designers to be just as lazy as programmers [1]... perhaps, dare I dream, even to become programmers themselves.

Aimed primarily at experienced InDesign users, while this may not be a very large demographic, Peter Kahrel's "Scripting InDesign with Javascript" is useful for anyone who needs to automate InDesign to create professional looking documents. This PDF serves an important purpose (as opposed to the majority of the API reference documents) "Scripting InDesign..." is perhaps the most accessible entrance to InDesign's API.

Since InDesign users aren't usually programmers, Kahrel begins with a brief Javascript tutorial. Now to some web programmers, Javascript may be the tool of the devil. I mean, we've all dealt with cross browser support and hacks. The web is saturated with examples of the worst kinds of Javascript abuse. Weird thing though -- turns out when it doesn't have to run a committee designed API on different interpreters, Javascript ain't too shabby.

Now, the bad. My main complaint was that one fairly essential feature (the ExtendScript Toolkit, basically Adobe's embedded IDE with a handy object catalog and console) required InDesign CS2, which was unavailable to me. Yes, I'm using obsolete software, but CS3 is going to be so much cooler, right? In any event, some kind of warning/system requirement might have been nice.

Now, to wrap things up: InDesign makes pretty documents. But we're all busy -- who wants to mouse all day? You've got things to do. Wouldn't you rather script you're work away instead? With the magic of computers, this is possible! But do you want to read through thick reference docs? Of course not! So get this PDF and learn how to get rolling. Then read the reference docs.

[1] http://www.wall.org/~larry/onion/talk.html#s-53