[ADV] Want to Write a Book?

[Matt Pattison]

I'd be interested in reading that book, and maybe helping out with it.
Some more chapters of this hypothetical book that would be nice to have:

- Simulation, modeling, random number generation
- Interfacing with other tools: gnuplot, Matlab, Excel, R, etc.
- Using ruby efficiently: extensions, mmap, narray
- Crafting domain-specific sublanguages for scientific apps
- Ruby and distributed/parallel processing
- Managing legacy C and Fortran code
- Ruby in a real-time environment?

Some folks on this list (Ara Howard and Bil Kleb come to mind) are
eminently qualified to write on those topics.

I'd really like to read this book - a year ago. Seriously, this would
be a great book that I would definitely buy. A lot of the momentum
around Ruby tends to be related to the web, it would be great for Ruby
to have momentum also for scientific / numerical tasks, similar to
Python for example.

Matt

 

[Michael Neumann]

Michael,





Wee is starting to look _really_ attractive. The size is lovely. One early
suggestion:

It may be better to not bake "render new page" into the render phase if that
means a whole new html page. I think something along the lines of partial
page replacement using xmlhttp, and the tiny bit of Javascript magic that
Avi wrote for this, would be a very attractive alternative
(http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/avi/blogView?showComments=true&tit
le=Cosying%20up%20to%20the%20client-side&entry=3268075684) It is really a
marvellous facility, and lines up quite well (I think) with Wee::Components.

(forwarded to Avi)

I think what you describe is best accomplished with callbacks, that do
what the render-phase or action-phase would do. Or maybe with
continuations. It's currently not possible to generate a response in the
action-phase in Wee. If I change this, and be able to just register an
action callback which returns some html, then this should work.
Probably, it's only a few lines to change ;-)

Not that I would make much use of it, as I think it's only usable in a
very few cases, and would probably break portability (JavaScript), but
if it results in a simplicification of the current Wee, then I'll
implement it.

Regards,

Michael

 

[gabriele renzi]

Michael Neumann ha scritto:

Not that I would make much use of it, as I think it's only usable in a
very few cases, and would probably break portability (JavaScript), but
if it results in a simplicification of the current Wee, then I'll
implement it.

well, if you do some live update stuff with javascript using
XmlHTTPRequest you should be fine on mozilla/firefox, IE, safari, recent
konqueror and the next opera. It is the stuff used in many widely know
things such as flickr.com or gmail, wich have quite a big audience.
(ok, lynx would be out probably

 

[Michael Neumann]

Michael Neumann ha scritto:


well, if you do some live update stuff with javascript using
XmlHTTPRequest you should be fine on mozilla/firefox, IE, safari, recent
konqueror and the next opera. It is the stuff used in many widely know
things such as flickr.com or gmail, wich have quite a big audience.
(ok, lynx would be out probably

okay, I'll implement it ;-)

Regards,

Michael

 

[gabriele renzi]

Michael Neumann ha scritto:

okay, I'll implement it ;-)

I just noticed that through the blog post referenced from itsme123 you
can get here:
http://www.papermountain.org/demos/live/
where the author has a Borges implementation.
I guess you can rip it out, at least the javascript magic

 

[Bil Kleb]

+1 From me

+1

Ara?

Regards,

 

[Dick Davies]

Michael Neumann ha scritto:


well, if you do some live update stuff with javascript using
XmlHTTPRequest you should be fine on mozilla/firefox, IE, safari, recent
konqueror and the next opera. It is the stuff used in many widely know
things such as flickr.com or gmail, wich have quite a big audience.
(ok, lynx would be out probably

See Google Suggest too:

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1

these guys never cease to boggle my mind when I try to guess how many acres
of computing power they must have to do something like this. I picture scenes
from the Matrix, except with motherboards rather than people in the pods...

 

[gabriele renzi]

Dick Davies ha scritto:

See Google Suggest too:

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1

even google-groups2 uses a similar interface. And even if nobody "hyped"
it, even yahoo mail does

these guys never cease to boggle my mind when I try to guess how many acres
of computing power they must have to do something like this. I picture scenes
from the Matrix, except with motherboards rather than people in the pods...

 

[Dee.Zsombor]

I believe I heard Matz stating that C extension API is not part of the
language itself, and as such it is expected to change in possibly
incompatible ways. Would not be than a safer bet sticking with SWIG for
interfacing, as a more _softer_ layer? I know, that would not be a Ruby
book :-(

 

[Brian Mitchell]

I believe I heard Matz stating that C extension API is not part of the
language itself, and as such it is expected to change in possibly
incompatible ways. Would not be than a safer bet sticking with SWIG for
interfacing, as a more _softer_ layer? I know, that would not be a Ruby
book :-(

Although it may change, a good book on ruby (the implementation)
internals has yet to be written in or translated to English. I would
love to see a version of the black book (Ruby Hacker's Guide) that I
could use more easily.

Brian M.

 

[Dee.Zsombor]

If you only want details about implementation internals you can
always use the source ... Luke!

 

[Brian Mitchell]

If you only want details about implementation internals you can
always use the source ... Luke!

That I know well. I wish I could just save some of my time as Ruby is
not the only thing I work on (in fact it's a small slice). Might
better source code documentation help? I don't know which would be
easier as good books are not easy to build overnight. Neither is good
documentation.

Brian M.

 

[Lyle Johnson]

If you only want details about implementation internals you can
always use the source ...

I appreciate the sentiment, but that's like saying that if you want to
understand how a car works you just need to look under the hood.

I've dug through the Ruby source code on more than one occasion to try
to get a handle on some of the trickier aspects of Ruby's
implementation, such as garbage collection or threads. It's easy
enough to see that some isolated function sets some variable to some
value; but without some higher-level explanations of the important
data structures and processes, it's near impossible to understand how
that isolated function fits into the big picture.

And that's why we must all pray that Guy Decoux stays in good health.

 

[Steven Jenkins]

A book I wish I had the time to write, but I'm swamped:

Using Ruby in Scientific Applications
- Numerical applications
- Analysis
- Data Acquisition
- Control
- Visualization
- Data archiving and retrieval

Maybe we should start a wiki and see where it goes. I'll contribute
something about the data acquisition work I've done with Comedi and Ruby.

Steve

 

[Benedikt Huber]

Maybe we should start a wiki and see where it goes. I'll contribute
something about the data acquisition work I've done with Comedi and Ruby.

Steve

A wiki on this topic would be very interesting indeed.
Any chance of starting one ?

I'd like to see a book as well of course.

Benedikt

 

[Kaspar Schiess]

(In response to by Steven Jenkins)

Maybe we should start a wiki and see where it goes. I'll contribute
something about the data acquisition work I've done with Comedi and Ruby.

I will contribute with the r4ruby project (R statistical analysis as a Ruby
library), but this has been rescheduled to middle/end of this year.

kaspar

hand manufactured code - www.tua.ch/ruby

 

[gabriele renzi]

Steven Jenkins ha scritto:

Maybe we should start a wiki and see where it goes. I'll contribute
something about the data acquisition work I've done with Comedi and Ruby.

maybe start a wikibook on hieraki

 

[Vladare]

- Functional style programming in Ruby

 

[Bil Kleb]

I thought Ara Howard was working on this book?