allskonar

I have read many great books on web development. Books that have been essential in honing my skills and helping me do my job with more confidence. But there is a diminishing return effect when adding a book to your tech book collection. These books always contain material that becomes increasingly less important for you, things such as the out of date install chapter, followed with short syntax overview where you get examples of how to assign a “hello world!” string to a foo variable. It looks to me that publishers basic assumption is that you are picking up a programming book is for the fist time.

The more in demand and popular web development gets the quality of the books on it suffers, mostly written by professional book writers some of who haven’t done actual development in years. It astonishing how absent books with real contemporary experiences straight from the trenches of web development are on the bookstore shelves. This is the information one tries to sniff out from blogs, case studies and online material, stuff that isn’t hold hostage by the editorial process, market research etc. But nothing really beats the book format as old fashioned that sounds. So ideally you would get all of the good stuff in a book format with none of the downsides, and how about just paying $10 in stead of the regular $50? Well, now you can.

Geoffrey Grosenbach, well known in Ruby on Rails community for his podcast and screencasts, has started his own publishing adventure PeepCode Press Manifesto and now has released a draft of his upcoming book Code Review. The book is filled with many good advice aimed to arm the novice developer with veteran information to avoid various pitfalls of Ruby on Rails web development. Configurations that are rubbish by default are mentioned in addition with lots of tips for optimization. I wish I had read a book like this earlier in my Ruby on Rails learning curve because that would have saved my a lot of embarrassment.

Code Review has an rather unusual approach it starts by telling you how to do it wrong and then goes on to correct that. This works because well because it is consistent through out so there isn’t any risk of confusing the wrong with something being right as is often can be the case. I am really looking forward to reading more books off the PeepCode Press! I hope they will all be as elegantly designed and articulate as Code Review is.

Over all it’s a great draft and you should go get it now, no joke