General
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Javascript Best Practices
One thing I've found really lacking in most Rails books is how to properly do JS. I think you should just gloss over the JS helpers and focus how to properly do JS inside a rails app. Fundamental things like using JSON for separation between controllers and front end. What to use wants.js for. And how doing your JS horribly can really muck up your app.
JS Testing too. Integrating with cucumber/capybara. Not sure if this outside the scope or not :)
18 votes -
16 votesplanned ·
AdminRyan Bigg
(Admin, Rails 3 Book) responded
Testing is one of the very first things covered, the first of course being Ruby itself and then Git.
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Background Processing / Queues
DJ, Reseque, things with redis possibly.
How/what/why to move to background processing.
8 votesplanned ·AdminRyan Bigg
(Admin, Rails 3 Book) responded
Planned to be covered, perhaps resque for this.
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Monitoring production Rails 3 apps
Tools and best practices for monitoring a Rails 3 app in production
7 votesplanned ·AdminRyan Bigg
(Admin, Rails 3 Book) responded
I think this is an absolutely essential part of any Rails book. You have to be monitoring the exceptions that will happen, even if you are doing testing.
Then you also have to be monitoring for when the server / something else blows up.
Great suggestion!
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How to contribute to opensource, maybe with an example using github
Show people what to do and include a CALL TO ACTION. Like u did on camp!
6 votes -
Stack agnosticism: how and when to swap in stack substitutes?
One of the central ideas to the Rails 3 version is that each part of the standard Rails stack is replaceable. Use practical examples of swapping in substitutes and, even, how to write your own substitutes and properly hook in.
6 votesunder review ·AdminRyan Bigg
(Admin, Rails 3 Book) responded
I’m thinking of covering how to swap out ActiveRecord with something else, like Datamapper or Mongo, or both. Do you think this would be worthwhile?
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Have a best practices chapter
Skinny Controller - Fat Model
Models that know to much about each other
Instance variables in partials
Just a few I can think off of the top of my head.5 votes -
Cover how to hook in to the new templating system
Now that the logic that governs ActionView etc. has been re-written to be completely pluggable. I'd like someone to explore the depths of just how flexible and dynamic it is.
5 votes -
5 votesplanned ·AdminRyan Bigg
(Admin, Rails 3 Book) responded
When changed-from-Rails-2 things are mentioned I was thinking of having like a footnote, or a reference number next to these things and an appendix at the end listing the changes.
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5 votesplanned ·AdminRyan Bigg
(Admin, Rails 3 Book) responded
This seems to be a common enough thing with Rails apps nowadays, so it’s in.
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5 votes
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3 votesplanned ·AdminRyan Bigg
(Admin, Rails 3 Book) responded
Paperclip, authlogic, cancan, aasm / statemachine / workflow (still deciding) will all get a play.
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2 votes
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Explore *useful* meta-programming in Rails
Keep to your blogs and e-commerce apps if you must, but I'd like to see just how crazy and useful you could get with meta-programming solutions to (common) problems.
2 votes -
1 vote
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1 voteplanned ·AdminRyan Bigg
(Admin, Rails 3 Book) responded
Git is of course a great way to back up your code, but backing up the data in your application is also important. Great idea.
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Page lifecycle
Please describe which Rails components are executing throughout a page's lifecycle. I think it would be most helpful to start with the "web server receives request and passes it off to..." and end with "the bits are sent to the user." At the very least, it would be very helpful for me if you provided an overview/graphic of the lifecycle.
1 vote -
Cover the confusing world of Date/Time/DateTime
How to set Time.zone, and how to "not worry" about times in Rails.
1 voteplanned ·AdminRyan Bigg
(Admin, Rails 3 Book) responded
Plan on covering this in the Authentication chapter when the user edits their profile details.
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Profiling, benchmarking, and optimization
How to tune rails applications for high performance, from the operating system / database, choice of ruby, etc through to programming approaches, tools for profiling, etc
1 vote -
Reference other useful books when you can't cover enough
One of the things I enjoy about "The Humane Interface" by Jef Raskin is that he doesn't expand or elaborate to the depths of his knowledge; He covers just enough to support his own ideas, and recommends you read (parts of) other books when the subject matter is tangential to his main line of discussion.
eg. I would not consider your rails 3 book to be the best place to spend too long explaining how to use Git. Beside Git's acceptance by convention, it's really outside the scope of Rails itself, and I'd prefer it to be covered elsewhere by… more
1 voteAdminRyan Bigg
(Admin, Rails 3 Book) responded
For the git section I will probably reference the Pro Git Book by Scott Chacon. Good suggestion.
