Ruby and Rails continues book bonanza
Posted by David May 07, 2007 @ 07:37 PM
O’Reilly has analyzed the book sales once again. Here are the juicy bits about Ruby and Rails books:
In the Web design and development area, it’s worth noting that Ruby on Rails has continued its blazing growth, but Ajax books have not. The decline of both PHP and ASP are striking…...Rails in the bottom middle was a small speck in last year’s first quarter post. Now the size of the box fits the size of its name at least. And its market share is almost equal to SQL and has surpassed VBA, Perl and Python. Python is also experiencing good growth, just not at the blazing velocity of Ruby. I would expect by next year, we will see Ruby have an even larger share/square.
The thing with AJAX is there is no ideal way of doing things aside from the lower-level Javascript objects involved. Web devs already know Javascript and they already know how to use the common frameworks (e.g. prototype + scriptaculous).
The popping up of ruby books is quite nice to see. Cookbooks here and there appear at bookshelves. There are lots of people going hey I’m gonna check out this ruby stuff.
That sounds great at first until you realize that the main reason people are buying those books is because the documentation sucks.
Following that reason, then PHP’s documentation much suck even worse. As must that of Java and .NET. All have higher book sales than Ruby and Rails at this point.
There are more books this year, but most are beginner level. Still, it’s good marketing toward business types.
I agree with Doodles. I buy 3-4 tech books monthly and have gotten little to no benefit out of Ajax-themed ones since Prototype.js abstracts most of the difficult Ajax issues that they address.
Now that there are Prototype-specific books being released, I’m hoping this will change.
To me it seems documentation for Rails was written on-the-fly, when you don’t have time to write complete usage doc while building framework. Maybe wikipedia-like capable RDoc with some design enhancement would help.
well, DHH, the rails docs are bit weak compared to other platforms. not to worry, some folks, like umm me, don’t mind being more productive with rails – even if they have to buy other books to get productive. i use http://gotapi.com and google for my rails docs.
What’s so bad about the Rails docs? As API docs I think they work great. If I know the method or class name I just fire up RI or go the the HTML and I usually get the details on what it does, parameters, etc. Better than most (but not all) frameworks out there really.
Now that’s not the same thing as a tutorial or a manual. There are plenty of getting started Rails tutorials and videos. But as far as something that will take you all the way through to a decent level of proficiency, yeah for that you’d want one of the books. But that’s true of most open source projects. Have you ever tried pointing a Hibernate beginner at the Hibernate reference docs? It’s pretty tough!
As someone who came to Ruby and Rails from the Zope world, I think the Rails docs are fantastic. Between the API docs, the myriad of books and helpful blogs, I’ve never run across an issue that I couldn’t figure out with some research. Of course, there is room for improvement and the caboo.se’ers are leading the charge on that. I really don’t see what there is to complain about.
O.T: I’ve been missing the r-favicon on the rails-pages for a while now (it’s hard to find those tabs in the browser without them). And I just noticed the alt-text “favicon” in the top left of this page. Please, can’t you bring back the red R???
I think the API docs are pretty good, but the problem is that some approach them as being more than an API reference. The docs are good for when you already know the method or class and you just need to refer to the parameters, etc.
One thing that I liked about the PHP docs, however, is the user comments portion, because it inevitably provided a wider scope of usage and examples, as well as pitfalls that people ran into.
I agree with Chris, the API docs need to be approached as API docs. Having said that, the RDoc for major base classes like ActiveRecord::Base really do a good job of giving a nice concise overview of how to use the framework. All in all, I’d give the Rails docs a B+, maybe an A-. Room for improvement, but still pretty durn good!
I really appreciate the effort that went into writing the Rails RDocs and I use them all the time.
Steve
Regarding documentation. Does anybody remember that $13K+ that was raised for professional Rails documentation purposes awhile back???? What ever happened with that? ( can’t find the blog post at the moment )
here is the link to the fundraiser that raised $13K for docs …
http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/2006/8/4/caboose-rails-documentation-drive
doc, a slush fund? ;)
I kid, I kid.
http://caboo.se/ perhaps?
www.railsbrain.com => Phat!
TJ:
I couldn’t agree more! Zope/Plone was a nightmare to learn. Poor documentation (if it even existed) and a grumpy disenfranchised community made a support a nightmare.
Compared to many languages/frameworks I’ve used over the years Rails is amazing, and the community is bar none!
http://labs.parkerfox.co.uk/ruby.search
this is a great resource
I ran across http://www.railsapi.org a while ago. It is basically PHP-style documentation for Rails.
As long as this gets picked up by the community, the user-generated examples could prove to be very useful.
I find the Rails API decent, but get most of my higher level info from the great blogs out there. Poke around http://rubyinside.com and the Ruby link aggregator in the right column, if you don’t already.
Regarding the books, does anyone know if any more advanced titles are in the works?
It’s clear that Rails has not yet hit it’s tipping point, but is getting there. As a newcomer to the framework (and Ruby) I can see this easily in the lack of quality google results for some basic Rails searches. Contrast this with Perl, where google can absolutely substitute for a bookshelf full of manuals and online documentation. Put another way, I think it would be easy to write useful Rails tutorials at this point that have never been written before :)
There goes that tipping point issue again.
What is the criteria for hitting the tipping point?
How many serious web developers aren’t aware of Rails at this point and is there any other Framework producing or enhancing plug-ins or extensions at a faster pace then Rails right now?
Aside from that you are comparing a framework with a language – do a search on Ruby (not Rails) and compare that with Perl.