I must admit some general annoyance at the recent trend in labeling 20-page web-only how-tos "books".

Though, given that the Sinatra source itself is under 2k lines, were it a real book, it would quickly be much longer than the source itself. :-)

I'm all for short-but-informative books* , but twenty pages is a booklet. It would be a good size for a chapter in a book on web tools or particularly good Ruby libraries, though.

* Such as seemingly everything Brian Kernighan has co-written.

Measuring programming (books) progress by lines of code (lines of text) is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight

That's trendy to say, and there's a lot of truth to it, but the fact of the matter is that the number of lines of code in a project does convey useful information about its complexity. More accurate would be to say that it's only one dimension in a multi-dimensional metric.

Just like with an airplane, if we add in the weight and what it's made of and used for all of the sudden it becomes a pretty interesting metric.

(Sorry if a quote sounded empty and cute, I will elaborate my thoughts.)

- Sintara is small (and arguably beautiful), a book on it should be small. Being small doesnot mean it shouldnot be called book.

- Wasn't our biggest gripe with J2ee monster was the enormous complexity, and to handle them the large books required. Wasn't that why rails Django were hailed as game changers? http://i44.tinypic.com/98uhs6.png

Smaller frameworks with smaller learning curve and books take that even further.

For some reason I enjoy using Sinatra more than Rails, I think it is simpler and more 'Ruby-ish'. Also it works well on the free and scaleable Google App Engine: http://goo.gl/6eW4.

Nice writeup. Sinatra with builder is just about perfect for implementing web services, dynamically generated RSS feeds, simple web apps, etc. Nicely complements using Rails for rich web apps.

This is one of those examples of why I love the Ruby community so much, it's almost hard to find a Ruby book/tutorial/blog post that hasn't been written with such love and care. It makes me feel all fuzzy inside, try to find a similar source for spring mvc :(

Well written. Includes a section on "deployment" at the end that summarizes various options -- including patches needed to get FastCGI working.

Specific instructions on how to deploy on dreamhost shared accounts (Passanger / fastcgi).

How can I contribute? There's a section under the Models for Sequel, but it is blank. I've done plenty of work with Sequel and Sinatra and I'm sure I could fill in the blanks.

You can fork it from http://github.com/sinatra/sinatra-book

Same as http://www.sinatrarb.com/book.html

It hasn't changed in a while. Is there a way to contribute?