AstonJ

Hi Helen, I didn't use a template - it's just a bog standard Open Office document and exported as a PDF :)

Hi, a glossary sounds like a great idea - thanks for the suggestion!

Awesome, thanks for the comment.

That's a great idea - thanks! Will definitely check out leanpub.

Hi Helen - thank you for the feedback, you make some great points!

I definitely need to iron out who the target market is, but for the time being I have expanded the note to include "(though you are introduced to these topics later – so don't panic if you don't know what they are just yet)."

I think I had envisaged that people coming to this book would have already made their minds up about learning Rails and perhaps already looked at some of the other books but felt a bit out of their depth - so would have probably come across some of the terms. Hence I though that I'd keep the more in-depth explanations to their respective chapters. But yeah I totally see what you mean so I may have to rethink that! Thanks again for the feedback.

Hi, thank you for the feedback.

I started writing the book on the weekend, and have tried to include details about the main concept and format (it's going to be split into three books). As it's early days I've only really touched on what will actually be included, but my thoughts so far are along these lines:

An introduction to Object Oriented Programming | Ruby basics | -why ruby | -datatypes | -variables | -classes | -etc | An introduction to Rails and the MVC architecture | -why rails etc | A Ruby on Rails tutorial - building your first app! | -1 | -2 | -3 | -4 | -etc | Using Gems | Using Git | Deploying | An introduction to Test Driven Development | -------? | -------? | -------? |

Originally I sought feedback from my friends, and as that's been very positive I thought it wise to get opinions from a wider audience, such as on HN.

Thanks for the link to the Sacha Greif book - I will definitely check it out!

I started off writing in WriteRoom (I love the full screen mode) but then it started to mess up my formatting so I moved to Open Office.

Thanks for the comment and link, I'm off to read it now :)

Haha thank you! I love the name too :)

Yes it can be tough - I agonised over Python and Ruby too, there was a lot going for them both, but in the end I followed my heart as I just felt more comfortable with Ruby :)

Thanks for the comment!

I completely agree with you! I think programming has become a lot easier in recent years, with the advent of languages such as Ruby and the sheer number of well thought out learning materially, particularly centring around good programming practises. And of course thanks to frameworks like Rails that do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Thanks for the comment and support!

Thanks for your feedback.

> Is your target audience absolute beginners to programming or experienced programmers who want to learn Rails?

Definitely more the former. Although I do assume the reader is familiar with the basics of HTML and CSS given that Rails is a web framework, but neither of those should be difficult to pick up.

I like the idea of including something on 'why' Ruby and hope to tackle those when I come to the Ruby chapter - I should also touch on reasons for choosing Rails in the introduction to Rails chapters. The reason I didn't include any of that in the initial chapters is because I am assuming people have already made their mind up in giving Rails a go - but definitely see your point and maybe I could add a note to say that is covered in the later chapters?

Thanks again for your feedback - much appreciated!