Yesterday, at the end of my first day of training here in Washington dC, I visited the local user group, that was meeting in one of the few days I'm around. The central location (a few blocks from the White House) was very nice, and the group was made of a couple dozen people, including some young guys. As this is not a Delphi-only group, but a group on programming in general, the topic was Ruby on Rails (quite a popular these these days). Brian Moelk did a good job explaining the core concepts of this framework in about one hour.

After that, I moderated a Q&A session about my book (I sold the only copy I had with me), the status of Delphi, CodeGear news, and some technical elements as well. It was a very relaxed and enjoyable evening. Thanks a lot for inviting me and for volunteering time to organize this and similar groups.

Today I had another full day of training (the main topic is new features of Delphi 2007 coming from Delphi 5). And the same tomorrow. Considering the 7 hours training a day, the evening event, the jet lag, the 45 minutes commute (each direction) while trying to convince the navigator to let me drive on the road I picked (which is much faster than the one it suggests), and the fact that I've been in the US less than 3 days... things are doing great!

By the way, I question I was asked yesterday is if there are more books of mine coming on Lulu. The answer is yes, given that the experience so far has been positive (on several different counts). It is very likely that the next book on Lulu will be a new edition (the first in print) of Essential Pascal, with a very low price so that even students can afford it. What do you think of this idea? Any other suggestion for book publishing? I'll probably repeat this question on a specific blog post soon as I have more information...