I really enjoyed reading Jesse Storimer’s recent post, 4 Months of ebook Sales, about the sales of his book “Working with Unix Processes”. His feelings echo my own regarding my book, “Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby”:

I’m ecstatic with the results so far, but I have no idea how they compare.

Our books complement each other quite well, and came out around the same time. He wrote his largely on his own, going the self-publishing route, while I wrote mine with the Pragmatic Programmers. I thought I’d write a similar piece from my experience going the “traditional” route.

Jesse Wolgamott has launched a training course called Ruby Off Rails, which is geared toward helping existing programmers learn Ruby first, and not Rails.

I heartily endorse this and highly recommend this approach if you want to “get into Rails”.

Anyone have a (formal / step-by-step) protocol for code reviews?

Yes, I do. At Opower, we were pretty serious about code reviews. We didn’t review every commit, but we did review a lot, and, after a while, fell into a pretty decent routine. This is an adaptation of that that I think is pretty decent.

When creating the outline for my book (now officially published and in print!), I decided to organize it around the nine facets of an awesome command-line app. Each chapter focuses on one of these facets. They state that an awesome command-line app should:

• have a clear and concise purpose
• be easy to use
• be helpful
• play well with others
• delight casual users
• make configuration easy for advanced users
• install and distribute painlessly
• be well-tested and as bug free as possible
• be easy to maintain

In this post, I’ll illustrate each of these facets (along with a test of the tenth chapter on color and formatting), via a code walkthrough of a simple command-line app I created for work.

Here’s a link to download from my talk on JRuby and Threads.

If you just want the “exercises”, here they are:

Apple has just announced Mountain Lion, the next version of OS X, due out in the summer. Although it’s more of an incremental upgrade than Lion was¹, one of the most interesting features is Gatekeeper. Gatekeeper, in brief, prevents unsigned code from running on OS X. Although it can be disabled, it’s on by default, and many feel this is the beginning of the end for users having full control of their computers. I feel the opposite: it’s not a slippery slope, and it’s actually a great feature.