Tuesday, July 12, 2005

We Reached the Station

Agile Web Development with Rails has been finalized. We worked hard with our printers, Malloy, to come up with what is possibly the most agile book publishing schedule ever. As a result, the final PDF went in for printing today (with 47 pages changed since I first sent them the book a week or so ago), and the books will be bound and boxed on July 28. They then enter the distribution phase, so it’ll still be a week or so before they start shipping, but it looks as if we’ll have some for OSCON.




Some stats:


  • The PML source for the book is about 145k words, and the files weigh in at 1.3Mb.

  • There are 1041 Ruby and rhtml source code files used as examples in the book (about 560kb).

  • The book went through roughly 2000 Subversion commits since inception.

  • Reviewers generated well in excess of 6Mb of comments.

  • We’ve had four released versions of the beta book, and now one final version.

  • Beta readers made over 780 suggestions, comments, and typo reports, most of which made their way into the printed book.

  • To date the book has been bought by people in sixty three countries (that blows me away).

Thank you again to everyone who trusted the process and participated in the Beta program. You can update to the final version of the PDF at the regular URL (I’ll be sending an e-mail around to you all sometime today with the link).


And for everyone else—the folks waiting for the dust to settle before exploring the book—now’s a great time to come on board. Welcome!