recursion

I'm happy to report that my contribution to Advanced Rails Recipes edited by Mike Clark has been published. If you buy the beta book, you can read my recipe: "Receiving E-mail Reliably via POP or IMAP."

It's pretty cool to get this published. It's my first dead-trees publication. Yes, of course I will be happy to autograph your copy. ;-)

The story behind the writing to the recipe is an interesting one. I found out that my recipe had been accepted for the book just before I left for Europe for my 6-week long trip. The deadline was early July, so I had to write the whole thing at internet cafes in various states of decrepitude all over Europe.

Thank god for poorly secured Windows computers! Without them, I wouldn't have been abled to install Putty and log into a server to test out the code I was writing about. Another challenge was trying to write a technical document on Google Docs with foreign keyboards revolting against me like French peasants. Another fun fact: Copying and pasting in Google Docs crashes IE 6. Oops!

Despite these challenges, I got it done on time. In the end, the book was delayed, so I probably didn't need to sweat it. But I think it was worth it.