When Bruce Perens first showed up at the #rubyonrails IRC channel, we were honored by his presence. Bruce is a thought leader on free and open source software and the series editor of Bruce Perens’ Open Source Series from Prentice Hall. He’s also an avid Ruby on Rails convert and asked me to post this endorsement here:

In 1981, when I started working on Unix, I remember being blown away by the power of the command-line pipes-and-filters paradigm. You could get real work done with simplicity, clarity, and economy of notation that wasn’t available in anything else at the time. I’ve worked with lots of programming environments since then, but none of them gave me that feeling of being able to write a solution so well that working code just flew off of my fingers. Until now: Ruby on Rails achieves for web programming the same sort of conceptual leap that Unix made for file-handling. You’ve got to try it!

As one who rarely misses an opportunity to tout the Rails horn, this is almost too kind. Thanks so much, Bruce!