Has anyone tried this on the Kindle 2?

I have heard that this is the best Ruby book. However, I intend to purchase only the best Ruby book that works on the Kindle (mobi format). Has anyone here purchased the PDF version and converted it to mobi themselves? How did it come out? Was it usable? What conversion software did you use?

On a related note, what is the most similar book to “Programming Ruby” which is available in mobi format? Is this book most similar to “The Ruby Programming Language” from O’Reilly Media?

One last thought: I realize (from another thread) that the source format of this book does not convert directly into mobi format, but that does not mean the book can’t be released in mobi format; it just means some extra human formatting would be involved. Pragmatic, I suspect that hiring an intern, or even Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, to do the conversion to mobi format would likely pay for itself and then some, as it would drive sales which will otherwise go to other publishers. Please consider this, at least as an experiment.

Thanks for your kind words.

Because the original version of this book, on which the current edition is based, predates our current production system, this book cannot be automatically converted to mobi or epub formats.

The text for the book runs to roughly 2Mb of LaTeX, and about 5,500 lines of Ruby source code in the example programs. Much of the LaTeX is fairly tricky stuff—all of our markup is semantic.

When the first edition of the book came out, I converted it to HTML (and gave that away for free). I estimate that took about 350-400 hours—a good solid two months of long days.

Although I understand what you’re saying (I’d like it in epub too), that’s a lot of work to undertake.

The OReilly book is different—it’s a more conventional topic-by-topic walk through the language, and it is now out of date. It is, however, available for the Kindle.

I’m sorry we can’t help you right now.

Regards

Dave Thomas

I second the need for this in mobi format. I have a DX so I can read the PDF, but it’s quite small. My guess is those headers and footers are keeping it from expanding to the maximum width.