Ruby Best Practices (full book available for download)

For the tl;dr crowd, this will take you straight to the PDF:<p><a href="http://sandal.github.com/rbp-book/pdfs/rbp_1-0.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://sandal.github.com/rbp-book/pdfs/rbp_1-0.pdf</a><p>(But please read the article, it provides context :)

I recommend this book whole heartily. I have been reading the chapters as they have been released, an excellent resource.

So, is this the full version of the O'Reilly book [1] or something different? I'm curious about the business end of this project: did you sell this PDF before giving it away for free? How much revenue have you brought in? How much time have you spent writing/compiling/editing this book in it's current state. It seems like a very highly regarded book (judging from the Amazon reviews) so perhaps I am just out of the loop on this one, but I find the business aspect of these ventures most interesting.<p>[1]<a href="http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&#38;tag=mozilla-20&#38;index=blended&#38;link_code=qs&#38;field-keywords=Ruby%20Best%20Practices&#38;sourceid=Mozilla-search" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&#38;tag=mozilla-20&#38;index...</a>

Keyword arguments via hashes is certainly not a best practice for "Beautiful API Design". Sending messages is part and parcel to good OO design. Code that deconstructs hashes to emulate keyword arguments is invariably hideously complicated.

The sandal username on GitHub sounded familiar, so I checked and realised its the same sandal that does the Prawn PDF library: <a href="http://github.com/sandal/prawn" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/sandal/prawn</a><p>That gives the book some extra credibility in my eyes.<p>EDIT: OK, now that I've read the foreward, I see Matz himself mentions Gregory's work on Prawn. Doh.

This looks sweet. Thanks sandal (for writing)/figured (for posting).

Thank you for writing this, and thanks for open sourcing it.

BTW, going to experiment with using a wiki page for collecting reader questions. Once I have a few lined up, I'll cut a blog post reply on the RBP blog.<p><a href="http://wiki.github.com/sandal/rbp-book/questions-for-gregory" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.github.com/sandal/rbp-book/questions-for-gregory</a>

Here's a copy on Google Docs. I hate PDFs:<p><a href="https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B8mB_WI1jRkCMzgyZWY5MzYtOTM0NC00YTRiLTg3NWMtZDU1MTdmM2QzNzU0&#38;hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B8mB_WI1jRkCMzgyZWY5MzY...</a>

Sweet! Thanks, Greg.