Inchoate Curmudgeon

Flexible Rails is an excellent “beta book” on the use of Adobe Flex with Ruby on Rails, but I think the beta book handle is a bit of a misnomer, particularly for this book. The book itself is the “tip of the iceberg” for a collection of resources managed by the author, Peter Armstrong, around the subject. In addition to the pdf formatted book, with (typically monthly) updates, book purchase gets you access to the following:

• A Google code group with several hundred of the book’s readers, closely monitored by he author.
• A pretty nice application, “pomodo”, which is the subject grist for the book’s mill.
• Complete Web 2.0 style bug tracking for the book and pomodo errata.

The book is divided into over 20 iterations, wherein pomodo is variously built, refactored, debugged, sliced, diced and otherwise explored from every conceivable angle with respect to Ruby on Rails and Adobe Flex. The process of the book’s elaboration parallels the complete elaboration of pomodo itself, and sharpens the edge of the turorial.

The Web 2.0 style participation in the evolution of the book and pomodo, provides huge value over and above the Flex and Rails tutorial itself. This participation is at least as enlightening, for those of us that would like to better understand and leverage the Web 2.0 participation-age tools and techniques, as it is in teaching the development of Rails and Flex applications. That is, if you don’t buy the book now, I think you miss out on a lot of valuable teaching that flows from the process.

I think the beta book designation is unfortunate and misleading. It needs a better name. The “book” presents a multi-dimensional, first-class, hands-on learning experience that is tough to quantify, but really easy to qualify: don’t miss it.

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