Beginning-Ruby-Book

A few days ago I received the latest in a long line of royalty statements for my book, Beginning Ruby (as published by Apress). Long time readers might recall that Ruby Inside was started principally to promote the book, but turned into so much more that the book took a back seat. Well, the whim came over me to share the murky details of being the author of such a book, including how the royalty statements work (or not), how much is earned, sales figures, and so forth.

Thanks to an article called "Top Programming Books on Google Book Search", I've discovered that many of the pages of my book, Beginning Ruby (available also in e-book format here), are available here on Google Book Search. Most of Chapter 3 is there, along with chunks of every other chapter, including quite a bit of Chapter 16, a reference of "Useful Ruby Libraries and Gems".

Blink and you'd miss it, but Ruby Inside celebrates its first anniversary today. To commemorate it, I want to post about the history of the site, how it all came together, present some statistics, and give some blog-related tips for anyone else who wants to create a similar blog.

The contracts have finally all been signed and I'm (Peter Cooper) already several chapters into writing a new Ruby book, Beginning Ruby, for APress. The information will probably go live on their site sometime in the next few weeks, but you've heard it here first.