[Rubycocoa-talk] Draft chapter of RubyCocoa book

[Brian M. <ma...@ex...>]

I'm writing a book on RubyCocoa for the Pragmatic Bookshelf, publisher  
of many fine titles. <http://www.pragprog.com/titles>

I'm ready for people to take a look at a chapter. It's actually the  
second chapter. The preceding introduction, covering prerequisites,  
the general plan of the book, its goals, what "Cocoa" is, etc. -- that  
will probably be written last.

But to orient yourselves:

- I assume you know Ruby, but nothing about Objective-C, Cocoa, or  
building apps on the Mac.

- Rather than build the exposition from the outside-in, teaching you  
first how to draw user interfaces, I'm working from Ruby up. I start  
with Ruby, then begin adding Cocoa ideas and tools onto it.

- Especially in the beginning of the book, I want people to start  
changing code and seeing what happens. Might as well take advantage of  
Ruby's fast edit-run loop.

The chapter and associated code are distributed as a disk image: http://www.exampler.com/tmp/drafts/draft-of-2008-02-08.dmg

What am I looking for? Don't bother with typos, misspellings, grammar,  
awkwardly-placed figures, and the like: those will all get changed  
later. I'm interested in two things:

1. Did the approach work for you? Did this chapter flow in a pleasing  
and sensible way? Is there information inexplicably missing?

2. Where did you get confused or stuck, in either the text or the "try  
this yourself" sections? Why? What would have helped?

Thanks.

Further announcements will go only to the mailing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/rubycocoa-book

-----
Brian Marick, independent consultant
Mostly on agile methods with a testing slant
www.exampler.com, www.exampler.com/blog, www.twitter.com/marick