The Curmudgeoclast » books

The RSpec Book is out in Beta

dastels — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 02:00:18 +0000

Hot of the virtual presses:

Source from TDD: A Practical Guide

dastels — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 05:27:03 +0000

Several people have asked me for the source from my last book “TDD: A Practical Guide”. A lot has happened since that book, and the files from it that were once posted on the Saorsa & Adaption sites were lost. Unfortunately I’ve had to tell people that the source was now longer in existence.

Well, today I was doing some routine housekeeping and… Huzah!!! I found a zip of those very source files. For anyone who has been looking for them… I’m pleased to say that I’m making them available at long last. You can download it here

The Ruby Way

dastels — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 22:00:00 +0000

I’ve started reading the 2nd edition of “The Ruby Way” by Hal Fulton.

So far it’s been good. I’ve been popping it open somewhat randomly so far, but plan to take a more structured look at it shortly. I enjoyed the overview of OO as applied to Ruby as well as the section on Rubyisms and idioms.

This is a big book, and looks very comprehensive. I’m looking forward to working through it.

One thing I have noticed… and I don’t know Hal so I’m not sure… is that there are comments regarding programming language issues that seem to indicate a lack of familiarity/awareness of Rubys grand-daddies: LISP & Smalltalk. Comments like “in more recent languages such as Java, memory is reclaimed…” Both LISP and Smalltalk had garbage collection. In fact that’s where the majority of GC research was done. This however is a minor quibble. This is a book about Ruby, and a good one at that.

TextMate book

dastels — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 06:48:00 +0000

TextMate

Power Editing for the Mac

James Edward Gray II

I’ve read a couple of the beta versions of this book from the Pragmatic Press. It’s good. If you are using TextMate, you should have this book. The current documentation for TextMate is pretty lame. This book does an admirable job of filling that void.

The writing style is easy to read, and is quite information dense. Content goes from basic cursor movement all the way to custom language support. It’s a good read, and packed with valuable and useful information.

That said, while I’m impressed with the book, I’ve become less and less impressed with TextMate itself. It’s a wonderful text editor and a sweet Mac app, and will long have a place on my dock. But for serious programming, it doesn’t cut it. I’ve gone back to “old faithful”… my constant companion from from way back.. GNU Emacs. If you’re doing serious programming, there’s nothing like Emacs.