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.

Hey Aston,

Glad to be of help. As a side note did you use a template for your ebook at all to get started? The headings look great & it has a nice flow, thanks.

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

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!

Hi, thanks for the comment and encouragement!

If you're looking for books on the internals of Rails, this one could be right up your street: http://patshaughnessy.net/ruby-under-a-microscope

If you're looking for more general but advanced books there are loads of fantastic ones - some of my favourites are Eloquent Ruby, Design Patterns in Ruby, Metaprogramming Ruby and there's Crafting Rails Applications for Rails (though I haven't started this myself yet - but I hear it's very good).