Over the course of writing Ruby Best Practices, I was thoroughly supported by my friends, family, and fellow hackers. I want to thank each and every one of the folks who've helped out with this book, because it would not exist without them.
This book did not have a typical technical review process, but instead was supported by an excellent advisory board whose members participated in group discussion and the occasional review as each chapter was released. These folks not only helped catch technical errors, but helped me sketch out the overall vision for how the book should come together as well. Participants included James Britt, Francis Hwang, Hart Larew, Chris Lee, Jeremy McAnally, and Aaron Patterson.
Rounding out the group was the best pair of guiding mentors I could hope for, Brad Ediger and James Edward Gray II. Both have published Ruby books, and have worked with me extensively on a number of Ruby projects. James and Brad were both instru- mental in producing this book, and to my career as a software developer in general. I have learned a ton from each of them, and thanks to their help with RBP, I can now pass their knowledge on to you.
Much of the source code in this book comes from the open source Ruby community. Although I talk about my own projects (Prawn and Ruport) a lot, most of the code I show is actually from other contributors or at least originated from good ideas that came up in mailing list discussions, feature requests, and so on. In addition to these two projects, I also have benefited from studying a whole slew of other gems, including but not limited to: ActiveSupport, builder, camping, faker, flexmock, gibberish, Haml, highline, lazy, Nokogiri, pdf-writer, and Rspec. Great thanks go out to all of the de- velopers of these projects, whom I’ve tried to acknowledge directly wherever I can throughout the text.
Of course, without Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz), we wouldn’t have Ruby in the first place. After writing this book, I am more impressed than ever by the language he has designed. If I’m lucky, this book will help show people just how beautiful Ruby can be.
Producing the technical content for this work was daunting, but only part of the overall picture. My editor, Mike Loukides, and the entire O’Reilly production team have made publishing this book a very comfortable experience. After overcoming major fears about the hurdles of working with a mainstream publisher, I’ve found the folks at O’Reilly to be helpful, accommodating, and supportive. It is especially nice that this book will become an open community resource less than a year after it prints. This measure is one I hope to see other technical book publishers adopt, and one I’m very thankful that O’Reilly was open to.
Finally, I need to thank the folks who’ve helped me keep my sanity while working on this huge project. My future wife, Jia Wu, has been amazingly supportive of me, and helped make sure that I occasionally ate and slept while working on this book. On the weekends, we’d usually escape for an bit and spend time with my close friends and family. Though they didn’t have anything to do with the project itself, without Pete, Paul, Mom, Dad, and Vinny, I doubt you’d be reading this book right now. Thanks to all of you, even if you’ll never need to read this book.
So many people helped out in countless different ways, that I’m sure I’ve missed someone important while compiling this list. To make sure these folks get their well-deserved credit, please let me know if there is someone who needs to be added to the list. But for now, if I’ve failed to list you here, thank you and please know that I’ve not forgotten what you’ve done to help me.