Presentation Zen

I received my copy yesterday, and only had a short time to flip through it, but so far, it looks like a really good book. There’s one section on going offline to “design” your presentation which I find true of so many things. Most of the time when I do web sites, the initial stages all happen offline, away from my computer — I don’t know why I thought presentations should be any different.

I also picked up a copy of Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion. I’ve been using Subversion for a while, but I just never feel like I’m using it properly. While “properly” is very subjective — I do check stuff in and out — it feels like Subversion can do so much more, and by not knowing about all the other stuff, I’m cheating myself. I can’t wait for Versions to come out for the Mac; I hope the UI lives up to my hopes.

Finally, I grabbed a copy of Obie Fernandez’s “The Rails Way” to hopefully, finally quench my thirst for knowledge about Ruby on Rails. I’ve read two other books (which shall remain nameless) and even though I can recite word for word what MVC is, I don’t feel like I’m actually proficient with Rails — like I could go write something other than just the example apps in the book. The Rails Way looks to be pretty comprehensive, so hopefully it will do the trick.