I've been reading the Merb Way by Foy Savas (Addison Wesley).  I was a little sceptical about this book at first, because of the recent marriage of the Merb and Rails core teams and the announcement that the Merb codebase would be merged with Rails as part of the march towards Rails 3. As Yehuda Katz put it, "Merb 2 is Rails 3".

So, is this book now redundant?  I don't think so. As Obie Fernandez explains in the foreword, knowing about Merb is still valuable as it is a fairly widely used framework, and it will probably continue to be seen in the wild for a good while after Rails 3 is released.  Additionally, learning how Merb works and exploring the underpinning philosophies will aid your understanding of some of the changes happening in Rails.

The book itself is engaging and well written, and serves as a great reference guide for developing Merb applications.  It's quite code-heavy, but this is by no means a criticism - Foy guides the reader through the Merb source, revealing how things are done in Merb, in order that the Ruby community can learn from it for developing our applications and future frameworks.

With under 300 pages of actual content, this is by no means a weighty tome, but it covers most things a Merb developer needs to know.  Foy starts with the fundamentals, explaining how Merb apps are structured and configured, as well as providing an introduction to some of the internals of Merb. The first part of the book is concerned with routing and MVC, which will be familiar to Rails developers.  It then moves onto more Merb-specific topics such as slices (self-contained mini-apps that can be packaged as gems) and parts (for reusable logic used in partials throughout your app). Sessions, authentication, and mailers are also covered, before the book concludes with a chapter on testing.

The Merb Way is available now from Amazon for $29.19 (or £23.19 from Amazon UK).

Since my reading time wasn’t influenced by distracting things like work or studies last year, I managed to read 69 books since end of April 2008, which quite likely is a new personal record for one year. Here’s the complete list, some of this books I had wanted to read forever, some others were just lucky finds and yet others were just…finds.

Marion Molteno: “A Language in Common”
James Frey: “A Million Little Pieces”
Haruki Murakami: “After Dark”
Haruki Murakami: “After the Quake: Stories”
Ali Smith: “Ali Smith’s Supersonic 70s”
Lewis Carroll: “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
Neil Gaiman: “American Gods”
Heinrich Böll: “Ansichten Eines Clowns”
Anita Desai: “Baumgartner’s Bombay”
Achmat Dangor: “Bitter Fruit”
Monica Ali: “Brick Lane”
Heinz Peter Schwerfel: “Buenos Aires intensiv.: Tango urbano – Stadt im Aufbruch”
Ines Rieder: “Cosmopolis: Urban Stories by Women”
Andrea Camilleri: “Der Hund aus Terracotta”
Peter Handke: “Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter”
Thomas Mann: “Die Betrogene. Erzählungen 1940 – 1953.”
Helge Schneider: “Die Memoiren des Rodriguez Fazantas”
Stanislaw Lem: “Eine Minute der Menschheit.”
Orson Scott Card: “Ender’s Game”
Terry Pratchett: “Equal Rites”
Jonathan Safran Foer: “Everything Is Illuminated”
Feridun Zaimoglu: “German Amok.”
Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman “Good Omens”
Haruki Murakami: “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World”
Irvine Welsh: “If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work”
Andre Brink: “Imaginings of Sand”
Orhan Pamuk: “Istanbul”
Gene Brewer: “K-Pax”
Haruki Murakami: “Kafka on the Shore”
Peter Handke: “Kali”
Feridun Zaimoglu: “Leinwand”
Yann Martel: “Life of Pi”
William Golding: “Lord of the Flies”
Elfriede Jelinek: “Lust”
Ryszard Kapuscinski: “Meine Reisen mit Herodot”
Saul Bellow: “Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories”
Howard Marks: “Mr. Nice: An Autobiography”
Orhan Pamuk: “My Name Is Red”
Eli Gottlieb: “Now You See Him: A Novel”
John Steinbeck: “Of Mice and Men”
Amit Gilboa “Off the Rails in Phnom Penh”
Terry Pratchett: “Pyramids”
Paul Torday: “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen”
Woody Allen: “Side Effects”
Miriam Tzali: “Soweto Stories”
Helen Oyeyemi: “The Icarus Girl”
John Updike: “Terrorist: A Novel”
Jorge Luis Borges: “The Aleph”
Zadie Smith: “The Autograph Man”
Alex Garland: “The Beach”
Iain M. Banks: “The Crow Road”
John Case: “The Eighth Day”
Paul Theroux: “The Elephanta Suite: Three Novellas”
Shan Sa: “The Girl Who Played Go”
Leon Uris: “The Haj”
Michael Cunningham: “The Hours”
Miguel de Cervantes: “The Jealous Extremaduran”
Terry Pratchett: “The Last Continent”
A. B. Yehoshua: “The Lover”
Ernest Hemingway: “The Old Man and The Sea”
M. C. Beaton: “The Quiche of Death”
Audrey Niffenegger: “The Time Traveler’s Wife”
Roddy Doyle: “The Van”
H.G. Wells: “The War of the Worlds (Penguin Classics)”
Iain M. Banks: “The Wasp Factory: A Novel”
Aravind Adiga: “The White Tiger: A Novel”
Terry Pratchett: “Thud!”
Zadie Smith: “White Teeth: A Novel”
Florian Weber: “You’ll Never Walk Alone. Ein Fußballmusikroman”

And that’s the 2 books I’m currently reading:

Nancy L. Clark: “South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid”
Will Ferguson: “Hokkaido Highway Blues”

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