Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: "This will copy the necessary files to your RAILS_ROOT/vendor/plugins folder and run the install.rb script."

A block of code will be set as follows:

class Kiosk < ActiveRecord::Base
def address
"#{self.street}, #{self.city}, #{self.state}, #{self.zipcode}"
end

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be made bold:

begin
kiosks.each { |kiosk|
loc = MultiGeocoder.geocode(kiosk.address)
kiosk.lat = loc.lat

Any command-line input and output is written as follows:

$./script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/geokit/trunk

New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".