What I’ve Earned and Learned From Writing A Popular(ish) Ruby Book

By Peter Cooper

A few days ago I received the latest in a long line of royalty statements for my book, Beginning Ruby (as published by Apress). Long time readers might recall that Ruby Inside was started principally to promote the book, but turned into so much more that the book took a back seat. Well, the whim came over me to share the murky details of being the author of such a book, including how the royalty statements work (or not), how much is earned, sales figures, and so forth.

So I wrote What I've Earned (And Learned) From Writing "Beginning Ruby" over at the new, official Beginning Ruby promotional site. I wasn't planning on mentioning it here, but the post became popular on Hacker News and Reddit to such an extent (almost 10,000 pageviews so far!) that it must be a story people want to read - so check it out.

For those who are interested, Beginning Ruby's 2nd edition was published just a couple of months ago with lots of updates, new sections, and two all-new chapters on Web application frameworks (Rails, Sinatra, and Ramaze) and GUI app development (using Shoes - erk). You can buy it at Amazon.com here or learn more at the official Beginning Ruby site. It's a great book for people who are new to Beginning Ruby (or programming generally, even) and you can see tons of reviews on Amazon's listing for the 1st edition (we're waiting for them to be merged into the 2nd edition's page!) or at the official site.

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