Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

Rails beta book and agile book publishing

Justin Gehtland blogs about getting the importance of getting the “last 20%” right when shipping a technical book - DHH’s and Dave Thomas’ approach with the beta Rails book is te best way to make sure and get that last 20 pefect before shipping. I agree completely and will go one step further - the agile book publishing system will become the general best practice in technical books in the same way TDD and continuous integration have become the best practice for software development. In five years from now I wouldn’t be surprised if O’Reilly and others embrace beta books as their primary publishing model.

[...] Its good to see that the Pragmatic Bookshelf is continuing with beta books for their future releases. The next two releases are Pragmatic Ajax and Enterprise Integration with Ruby, both of which sound very cool. I’m hoping the efforts to get information published quicker, in smaller chunks, and incrementally will continue and spread to other tech publishers. Agile publishing really benefits everyone involved. [...]