Noel Rappin
noelrap@ruby.social

Beta 4 of the book has been released and is available for purchase at pragprog.com/titles/ruby5/prog

* The final two chapters have been added to Part V
* The final two appendixes have been added

Plus some of the reference layout in Part V was cleaned up to be more consistent.

This makes the book draft-complete.

May 18, 2023
Noel Rappin
noelrap@ruby.social

What's a good book about using a Unix command line that is a) aimed at relative beginners and b) is reasonably recent?

May 18, 2023
Noel Rappin
noelrap@ruby.social

Here's a weird question, and I think I'm missing something obvious.

I am trying to run this command programmatically:

`rubocop --show-cops`

It works fine in an actual terminal, but when I try to run it inside backticks inside Ruby code, it fails if the rubocop config has plugins.

It's as if the backtick version doesn't have access to the full context of the terminal that allows it to see the plugins as gems? I'm not sure.

May 15, 2023
Noel Rappin
noelrap@ruby.social

Last night I sent a draft complete version of the book to my editor.

The current count is 645 pages, likely to change.

We'll do a round or two of feedback, and a new beta will come out and the book will go to final tech review, followed by copyedit and layout.

May 15, 2023
Noel Rappin
noelrap@ruby.social

I have 12 versions of the “move a string to the end of an array” code at gist.github.com/noelrappin/a04

For the record:
Option 1 is ChatGPT
Option 2 is my original version
Option 6 is ChatGPT refining when I requested a shorter version.

I also requested an elegant version and got one that didn’t work.

May 10, 2023