jessieay
commented
10 years ago Hi @dgdosen - thanks for opening this issue!
This is something I've thought about quite a bit. When we started the book, the intention was to write a guide, especially for the Rails part of the book, because the book was written for people with some Rails experience, so we didn't want to spend a lot of time explaining the basics of setting up a Rails app.
As the book has developed, I can see that it is looking more and more like a recipe book. I think the challenge with writing a guide is that you want to explain concepts thoroughly without explaining every little detail of building the app (like the Hartl tutorial, which is awesome but extremely long). I do think that writing a guide makes more sense for this book, especially given the audience.
Do you have any suggestions for how we could make this fact clearer? Are there any other guides out there that do a good job of explaining concepts while making it clear that it is a not to be followed as a recipe? I think more clearly explaining the intention in the intro would be a good start, but I'd be interested in seeing examples of books who do this well.
Thanks again for opening the issue, I think this is a great topic for discussion!
I will also open up issues for the text inconsistencies you brought up, since those should definitely be cleaned up.
edwardloveall
Are you intending for this book to be a recipe? (with exact steps to follow) or a guide (not with direct steps?)
I ask because if you try to use it as a recipe, it falls down a bit - for example - say I want to create a client class on iOS using AFNetworking (over NSURLSession).
But the way the text is organized, information on creating an AppSecret is in the text for using an NSURLSession, but not in the AFNetworking Session. The problem is, the AFNetworking section relies on an AppSecret too.
It's this kind of inconsistency that makes the book more difficult than not using it at all. (In this early beta state)