Books on programming/software development have always been plagued with too much content, either failing to be concise and terse or padded with all sorts of extraneous filler or worse, taking too many words to educate an aspiring apprentice. It seems that the *C Programming Language* by Kernighan and Ritchie, the classic programmer instruction text, is a Sisyphusian goal that few are unable to achieve.

OTOH, with the explosion of ebooks, there is now the tendency to reduce the content a bit too much, and squeeze a book into less than a 100 pages. Enter *Sinatra: Up and Running* which suffers from this malady.

Oh, it is an alright treatment of getting up to snuff with Sinatra, the simplistic, no frills, web framework that easily enables a developer to get a HTTP REST framework off the ground in no time, rivaling PHP in simplicity of building a web app. And there is decent coverage of some of Sinatra's internals. And the final chapter elucidates a "roll your own", very minimalistic blog engine.

But here is what is missing -- a more robust application example, or additional examples. More information on Rack, the middleware portion and on how to extend and customize. There are tidbits on how to drive Sinatra in "modular" form, rather than "classical" form, but the guide here was a tad too terse for my taste. Also, I recognize that reference type material gets dated fast, but it still would have been nice to have a quick reference chart / FAQ of how to accomplish specific tasks (kind of like the old Sinatra book did, before it got tore down and replaced with a hodgepodge of disparate blurbs).