An enjoyable lesson book

DragonFly user ‘why the lucky stiff’ has put together a book called ‘Nobody Knows Shoes‘.  Shoes is a library for creating graphical interfaces on Ruby applications.  The book is a lesson on how to use Shoes, mixed in with hand-drawn and collaged art, and available as a free download or a physical, purchasable object.

I am all for more interesting computer books.  This one reads as a mix between an O’Reilly Nutshell guide and The Book of the Subgenius, or perhaps a Max Ernst novel.

Alert readers may remember why’s previous book, “Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby“.

DragonFly, by comparison

Dmitri Nikulin wrote a long post on users@ about how he was worried that DragonFly would lose importance given that FreeBSD 7 has improved performance relative to FreeBSD 5/6.  Responses include a number of anecdotes on how agreeable the DragonFly community can be, plus my note that DragonFly validation does not require FreeBSD to suck.  Matthew Dillon noted his concerns as project leader, and the difficulty of explaining how significant the changes from FreeBSD-4 are in DragonFly.