Refactoring Ruby

Jay Fields and friends are rewriting/porting Martin Fowler and friends' Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code book to Ruby. I guess since the IDEs aren't there yet, we might as well get going on the manual process! Good show to Jay et. al. They've made a dent in the first section, hope they keep it up.

I still keep a copy of Refactoring on my desk. It's one of about 20 books I still need to keep around on my desktop. The content is somewhat timeless, and (was) not readily available on the internet. Still, the Jav-oid nature of the text makes it a little less relevant to my current world of Ruby. It also serves as a badge of good programming knowledge.

I've been selling off a lot of my other books on Amazon. Someone bought the Sun Certified J2EE Architect guide from 2002 for $16. Someone else bought Rod Johnson's old Expert J2EE development, the early edition, before he finished Spring, for $15. No takers on Tapestry yet at $10. Many books have a used value below a $1. I am debating what to do with them as it's not worth my time to sell them. The chances I need a Turbo Assembler reference have dropped about as low as they can, no library would want it, still, it was a good book in it's day, and it is sad that it is no longer relevant to anyone's life. I also think "professional Java Web Services" is probably not worth the shelf space. Well, maybe it will be recycled into a better book someday.