PragDave

Using comments as rake task descriptions

Over lunch at Scotland on Rails, Jim, Chad, and I got talking about the way you use desc to document tasks in rake.

desc "Remove intermediate files and other work products"
task :cleanup do
  ...
end

This has always been an interesting feature of rake—the idea that you have a kind of temporal coupling between one method call and the next. It works well, but somehow it's always struck me as a little obtrusive.

So, during the afternoon, I hacked up a quick change to rake that looks for a single-line comment on the line prior to all task, file, etc directives, and uses that as the task description. With this version of rake,  you can write

# Remove intermediate files and other work products
task :cleanup do
  ...
end

The comment becomes the description of the task, because it occurs before the task directive with no intervening blank line. desc still works, and if both desc and a comment are present, the desc takes priority. It's purely a matter of taste, but I personally find the comment form more natural.

You can get this patched version from http://github.com/pragdavespc/rake/tree/master. I've passed the patch on to Jim, so if you like the idea, let him know and maybe he'll roll it into the next rake release.

Shipping the Rails Book

Last week we completed our largest direct shippment, as we sent out the preorders for Agille Web Development with Rails, Third Edition. We had tons of books delivered, and bought tens of thousands of dollars of shipping supplies and postage, but despite the volume everything went well (apart from the inevitable paper cuts). I even learned where the big boys go to the Post Office (which turns out to be a pretty impressive facility right next to DFW airport).

So I thought I'd share just a couple of statistics. Domestically, we shipped books to every state except North Dakota. Internationally we shipped to three US bases, and a total of 55 different countries (from Angola to Vietnam). Sometimes I close my eyes and think of the trajectories of all those books spreading out from Raleigh and Dallas—it's a cool picture.

So, if you bought a Rails book from us: thank you! It's been an interesting year (way longer than would would have liked, but that's the joy of working with a rapidly changing technology). We hope you enjoy the result. And, remember, we now have eBook formats  available for your Kindle, iPhone, and so on.