Anyone Can Ride Rails - should I write this book?

I think you should keep going. In my opinion any materials that make it easier for beginners to get started on programming are a net benefit to society. Over the coming years I think there is going to be a divide between those that can program and those that can't as technology continues to be an ever increasing part of our lives. I am in full support of anything that helps break down the barrier to jumping in and getting started.<p>Great start and I look forward to seeing the finished version. Keep us updated on your progress.

A few observations. One, you haven't written that many pages, in fact you've written very, very few pages save for the preface and the like. This isn't an issue on its own, except theres no Table of Contents so it's hard for me to see where you are going to take it from here, or in other words what your vision is. The obvious result of this is that it's pretty hard to provide feedback. The flip side is of course, that you've demonstrated enough desire and initiative within yourself to endeavor to start the book, so unless you have a serious reason to stop, maybe forge ahead and try to finish what you started.<p>One other thing that I just want to put in your head, I'm not sure if I'm even going so far as to suggest it, is the possibility of flexing scope to write perhaps a 50 page e-book, not dissimilar to the Sacha Greif ebook (<a href="http://sachagreif.com/ebook/" rel="nofollow">http://sachagreif.com/ebook/</a>) but for getting from zero to the next book on Rails for absolute beginners. The benefit of this would be that you could probably spend about 20 hours writing it (I'm pulling this number out of my ass, so I could be waaay off about this time estimate) and therefore you've risked a much shorter amount of time, which I'm assuming is your main concern.

I'm glad you start from a 'what you'll need' point of view. This is often missed in most books where they just start with a code 1+1 example.<p>If you are aiming for total beginners - as in, new to programming and not just new to Ruby/Rails then you might have to re-word your About this book section.<p>You mention TDD, Git, 'default Ruby stack' within the first 8 lines of the book. While these are important points regarding the book - they only make sense to programmers of some kind.<p>I think if you give away a sample chapter of your book then this will be the first thing they read. You've got to convince the new folks you'll look after them &#38; that they will actually get as far as building their first app. You may want to consider adding a book subtitle. I presume the readers you want to attract might not even know what Rails is! Maybe something like - Anyone Can Ride Rails - A fresh programming guide for enthusiasic beginners.<p>I like the informal tone as it's reassuring. I also second the what is Ruby/Rails &#38; why should I use them, what can I build with it etc?

I don't want to discourage you, I'm just gonna give you my honest personal thoughts. I think there is a lot of this kind of stuff on the web already. What I think there is less of (maybe there's also less demand for it), is deep rails or ruby VM type stuff. I do most of my programming in c/c++ though (so I'm no ruby expert) and whenever I need to pick up a scripting language or framework like rails, usually I try to grab something that has maximum code, with bar minimum and to the point explanations, and get annoyed whenever anyone talks about intro to OOP or starts explaining functions, variables, etc. So obviously, I'm not your audience for this book.<p>Having said all that I don't want to be a downer here, I think its great you're writing a book and possibly getting people interested in programming :)

Is your target audience absolute beginners to programming or experienced programmers who want to learn Rails?<p>One thing I Have never seen is a "why" you should learn Rails and what you can do with it. What kind of web apps can I build? What can I do with it? Why would I want to?<p>Personally, I don't go for the informal tone, but it wasn't over the top and many books tend to go that way so no problem.<p>I like that it seems you won't be preaching about side technologies like git or tdd. It is an added difficulty when people add extra complications to a book, especially an intro level book. My personal opinion, don't go preachy on formatting or style either, just use well written examples for people to learn from and they will pick up your style.

Why not see what the market thinks of your idea by trying the 'lean publishing' route? Check out <a href="http://leanpub.com" rel="nofollow">http://leanpub.com</a> as one [good] way to do it. It's working out pretty well for me so far. It would mean moving from OpenOffice to Markdown formatting, but the whole Dropbox + Markdown approach that Leanpub uses is pretty good and there is decent support for code blocks etc

I'm a RoR beginner with a little know-how from other languages like PHP and think you should also include some other interesting parts like Stackoverflow, GitHub, Heroku etc. There is plenty of stuff out there with no real description for a programming-beginner. In my early days I have search for a long time a good description for what a gem is. And this is only one example, lol.

<a href="http://astonj.com/anyone-can-ride-rails.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://astonj.com/anyone-can-ride-rails.pdf</a>

Nice start. I think you should keep going. This might be helpful. <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/28/why-every-entrepreneur-should-self-publish-a-book/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/28/why-every-entrepreneur-shou...</a><p>What software do you use to write your book?

Okay - if you are going for the absolute beginner market, then, in my opinion, you have too much front matter. I'm new to code, I want to build something cool - let me at it now, not 20 pages in.

I'm a ruby &#38; rails beginner so I would definitely be interested in a book like this.

Whatever will be your decision, this is a great book title!