The RSpec Book is out in beta version!

It's a long expected book for the BDD Community. The first time I mention this book was at the Paris on Rails 2007 conference. Since then, many changes happened and it seems that API and Practices are mature enough to release a book. As far as I am concerned, the biggest boost was given by Aslak with Cucumber.

Before adding more love, I'll write about 2 small caveats. It's still a bit hard to contribute to the RSpec project as code is a bit complex, I mean compares to bacon or shoulda. The other is the painful upgrading process since version 1.0: no matters what, I always end up spending 2-3 hours to fix my specs or autospec when I update the RSpec gem ...

Apart from that, RSpec and cucumber are one of the things which make me feeling at home working with Ruby (on Rails). Being able to describe the business rules and features is a big step for the software industry. How many hours lost because of misunderstanding between customers and programmers???
This book is aimed at programmers, my hope is that there will be other books following, targeting the customers (business analyst, project manager, end user). So little by little, we learn how to communicate clearly to each other and build better software ...

Never Judge A Book By Its Cover!

The second part of this post has nothing to do with technology or the quality of the book. I want to question the choice of an incandescent bulb to represent a technology as innovative as RSpec.

I have been volunteering for 2 years in an environmentalist NGO and one of the things I keep repeating is how bad for the environment are the old incandescent bulbs. I guess pragmatic programmers editors and RSpec book authors are very busy finishing the book and have other priorities ...

However, in these times of "green revolution", I hope that many RSpec users feel concerned about environmental issues and ask David and other authors to pick another image cover. It's a detail, I know but we have to replace all these electricity greedy bulbs even in the book covers!

RSpec is for alpha geek - the earlier adopters - and I don’t identify myself to a technology born in the XIX century !!!

Why not using a Compact Fluorescent bulb?

Or even more alpha geek, an LED_lamp ?

More information on http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2007/Update66.htm

UPDATE: International Energy Agency Press release : "Worldwide, grid-based electric lighting consumes 19% of total global electricity production" ..."It shows that were end-users to install only efficient lamps that will save money over the life cycle of the lighting service. Following these measures would save more than 16 000 Mt of CO2 emissions over the same time frame – equivalent to about 6 years of current global car emissions – and would avoid USD 2 600 billion"

http://www.thedailygreen.com/green-homes/eco-friendly/congress-incandescent-light-bulbs-ban-461217

I found the LED bulb image at http://www.flickr.com/photos/partybooper_rob/2324613709/sizes/l/ (Collective Commons)