Foreword

When Rob asked me to write the foreword for his book I jumped at the chance. Actually, I jumped at telling him I'd write the foreword and then I got distracted with billions of things and had to finally get it down in a flash of brilliance. Trust me, it's brilliant. This foreword will change your life, cure baldness, give your enemies lymphoma, and nuns will recite it to their classes as a reward for good behavior. It's that good.

The reason I wanted to write a foreword for a cookbook, and specifically for Rails Cookbook, is that I wouldn't be here today if it weren't for this type of book. When learning to write code, administer systems, or cook fish the young junior will typically run out and get your basic introductory books. These books try take the newbie through a fixed road of learning that covers most topics lightly in the curriculum. At first this is great, and the junior learns a lot of "bootstrap knowledge" with the things he didn't know he didn't know getting filled in like grout over broken tile.

After this initial learning though, these books are fairly useless because they are horrible references. If you read them straight through and put stickies on the important pages you might get something out of it. Having to troll through one of these dense tomes to find that thing you thought you remembered in chapter maybe 8 or 9 sucks really bad at 2 a.m. Been there, done that, bought the pajamas in lime green.

This is where the "cookbook" genre comes into play, and why these types of books made me a better programmer. The one book that stands out in my mind is Perl Cookbook. No, I'm not saying that because it is also an O'Reilly book; I'm saying it because that book was by far the most fantastic cookbook ever. In the days when I was doing relatively serious Perl coding, having "the cookbook" around helped me learn all the tricks I needed right when I needed them.

Perl helped me take charge of a wildly managed heterogeneous network of computers, and the cookbook helped me tame the wild Perl. Perl was also my first light foray into CGI programming and processing for the Web. It was a great way to learn CGI too, because all the nasty stuff was already taken care of, and Perl had all the gear you needed to program back then. Oh, I remember <blink> fondly.

I'd have to say I didn't learn any Perl until I bought my copy of the cookbook, slammed it and a case of soda on a table, and spent an entire night writing a program to look for malicious attacks in my system logs. I'd read a few good books, but it was the ability to ask a question, get an answer, then implement the solution that taught me real Perl coding. Best of all, I could apply a technique, read about how it worked, and then totally forget about it, only leaving a tiny marker in my brain saying where to look it up again.

With my Perl Cookbook I became a rock star geek in my own little way. My peers would spend hours trying to solve a problem, and I'd just look it up and bang it out with Perl in a few minutes. I could manage huge numbers of systems with simple automation. I even learned to appreciate some of the quirks of Perl for what they were.

Why would I be talking about Perl in a Rails Cookbook foreword? Well, apart from the fact that Rob said I could say anything in the foreword, the Perl Cookbook was the one that set the standard for me. It doesn't matter what language it was about; what mattered was that this one book made me a competent Perl programmer and system automator where nearly all other books fell flat. It's a great example of the synergy of a set of components making the whole greater.

The power of a good cookbook is its ability to impart expert knowledge in digestible chunks to beginners. Just like with real cookbooks, they are designed for people who may know the theory or basics of the task, but don't have the mountains of domain knowledge and experience that an expert steeped in the technology would have. The cookbook gets readers into practicing and doing expert activities and hopefully teaches them the right way to do the tricks of the trade.

Rob's Rails Cookbook will hopefully do the same thing for those people just starting out with their first Ruby on Rails project. It also will be a good reference for those "beginning intermediates" who still have to look things up they rarely use or haven't done before. It's also great for crusty old guys like me who can't even remember what we had for breakfast that morning.

Zed A. Shaw, creator of Mongrel and MUDCRAP-CE Master Black Belt Sifu, (http://www.zedshaw.com)