Global Nerdy

SitePoint is making the PDF version of their Rails book Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Applications available for FREE for the next 60 days.

Here’s what SitePoint has to say about this giveaway:

That’s right… Not an extract… Not a sample chapter… The ENTIRE 447 pages of Patrick Lenz’s incredible book is (for the next 60 days) free to download.

From installing Ruby, Rails and MySQL, to building and deploying a fully featured web application, this book has it all. Imagine building a Web 2.0 social news application, while learning the ins-and-outs of Ruby on Rails. This book shows you how to do it, step by step …

It’s no wonder this book has been described as the best Ruby on Rails beginners’ book on the market.

If you’ve ever thought about trying out Ruby on Rails, you’ll never get a better chance to learn why everyone’s talking about this revolutionary web development framework.

The book isn’t quite up-to-date — it covers Ruby on Rails 1.1.6 rather than Ruby 1.2 — but the material in the book as well as the code examples seem to be compatible with the current version. The book has been reviewed quite favorably, and it looks as though it might make a good companion to a book like the Pragmatic Programmers’ Agile Web Development with Rails.

Click the photo to see the Flickr photoset.

For the curious, there’s a Flickr photoset with pics from Saturday’s “Furries vs. Klingons” bowling competition in Atlanta.

Someone at the National Review suggested that the event might be the death knell of Western Civilization, but it’s really no sillier than a great deal of the activities that the National Review’s right-wing heroes partake in at Bohemian Grove (and far more harmless).

I live in Toronto, a city where a lot of movie filming takes place (recently, our Yonge Street has been standing in for New York’s Harlem in the upcoming Incredible Hulk movie). There’s always a movie shoot going on — you can tell by the pylons with the location company’s logo and the row of white trailers, we have a number of lots that store New York City police cars and cabs, and a number of downtown used furniture stores specialize in renting furniture for movie sets.

The library scene is a staple of movies, often used to inform the audience that a certain character is well-educated, or in the case of a private library, whether in a home or a gentleman’s club, it’s used to establish that a character is rich. Ever wondered where they get the books for these scenes from? One source is New York’s famous bookstore, The Strand (whose slogan is “18 miles of books”), which offers a service called Books by the Foot.

There’s more on the service (recently used for Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull) in a New Yorker piece titled Books in Bulk.

[Thanks to Jason Kottke for the link!]