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This is a good point. Ruby, and especially Ruby on Rails, did fall out of favor quite quickly. I think that many people and organizations regret falling for the hype. Ruby and Ruby on Rails both gained a pretty bad reputation for being slow and bloated, and software written using them was often found to be difficult to maintain. Dynamically typed scripting languages might work well for quickly throwing together a prototype, but they often aren't so good for writing large software systems that must be maintained for many years or even decades.

It is also important to note that some prominent members of the Ruby and/or Ruby on Rails communities jumped ship to Rust when it started to become obvious that the Ruby and Ruby on Rails hype was wearing very thin, and the Rust hype was just starting to build.

For example, look at the Rust Core Team. We see Yehuda Katz listed, who is apparently a former member of the Ruby on Rails Core Team. We also see Steve Klabnik listed. He apparently wrote a book about Ruby on Rails with Katz. Alex Crichton appears to maintain some Ruby gems.

So over 30% of Rust's Core Team was involved with Ruby at some point. It might even be more than that. This has made me very suspicious and weary of Rust. I personally have had bad experiences with Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and I fear that I might be subjected to the same hype-driven nonsense if I get anywhere near Rust, due to the same people being involved with both.

And yet, read the other answer on that same Quora page.

I would also add that the opinion of an Engineering VP at Twitter might take into account a whole bunch of things that aren't applicable to the dev who is trying to decide whether learning a language is worthwhile to them. Those are two very different points of view, with very different considerations. I love working in Scala, but if I were building a team of probably over 100 engineers, I might think twice.

Also keep in mind that Twitter was one of the very early adopters of Scala. They lived through growing pains in the ecosystem that newcomers to the language will never have to encounter.

Scala has a learning curve, no doubt about it. Its design tends to emphasize features that are very general. You put in some extra effort upfront, but you get more mileage in the long run. Scala also has a very rich ecosystem of libraries that may approach the same problems with different philosophies. Some find the amount of choice paralyzing. It's a bit reminiscent of the React ecosystem. But I think I speak for many Scala fans when I say that it feels very rewarding and empowering as a programmer to work with.

Intellectual benefits aside, I've also found it to be a language for getting things done. My small team launched a mission-critical distributed system in 6 months, with me as the only veteran Scala programmer. I give a lot of credit to the extremely robust ecosystem of libraries around Scala -- especially Lightbend's Akka and Slick. A lot of ready-made tech mapped very nicely to our problem domain, and we were off to the races. The documentation is great and there's lots of support available.

My advice for the OP: take the Coursera course and/or give the Red Book a spin. You'll likely be challenged but also you may find it to be very intellectually stimulating.

.. wonder why kind of idiots would build a language like that.

Bruce Payette is a founding member of the PowerShell team at Microsoft. He is a co-designer of the PowerShell language and the principal author of the language implementation. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked at Softway Systems and MKS, building UNIX tools for Windows.

I highly suggest his book: https://www.manning.com/books/...

I think that the article kind of unfairly glosses over my contribution. I posted the original reddit thread, and I'm the one who discovered the codes required to actually enable the LEDs on the device. I appreciate that Oliver is an actual VR researcher, but I did this in part to get some visibility for the book I'm writing on Oculus Rift development.

Looks like the article was updated since your comment, right? In any case, thanks for the hard work; I'm looking forward to some super cool stuff built on top of it.

I think that the article kind of unfairly glosses over my contribution. I posted the original reddit thread, and I'm the one who discovered the codes required to actually enable the LEDs on the device. I appreciate that Oliver is an actual VR researcher, but I did this in part to get some visibility for the book I'm writing on Oculus Rift development.

Other companies (eg some publishers) sell books online along with a free PDF.

The first time I had come across this was Manning, who publishes The Quick Python Book, which I find to be most excellent.

Because of this, I normally scope out books from Manning before I do anywhere else to see if they have a book on a topic in which I'm interested.

I've spoken to countless now-engineers and professional programmers who started learned programming by playing around with graphing calculators. They're ubiquitous, your audience is huge, and the built-in TI-BASIC language is surprisingly powerful. I'd definitely recommend he pursue that as a means to learn to think like a programmer, skills like structuring programs, prototyping with pseudocode, debugging, and all that. In fact, I wrote a book teaching those very skills. Alternatively, Python is a great beginner computer language in that the syntax is clear and cruft-free (yes, Java, I'm looking at public static void main()...) and crashes are generally graceful and easy-to-debug.

Why can't we get copies of our ebooks when we buy the dead-tree version?

I bought a book on machine learning from Manning - they do the popular "In Action" computer series http://www.manning.com/catalog/by/subject/ and they do give you a free non-drmed ebook (includes PDF, ePub, and Kindle) with every physical copy of the book you buy. http://www.manning.com/about/ebooks.html "If you did not buy the pBook from manning.com, you can still get the free eBook in all available formats by setting up a Manning account, and registering your copy."

Why can't we get copies of our ebooks when we buy the dead-tree version?

I bought a book on machine learning from Manning - they do the popular "In Action" computer series http://www.manning.com/catalog/by/subject/ and they do give you a free non-drmed ebook (includes PDF, ePub, and Kindle) with every physical copy of the book you buy. http://www.manning.com/about/ebooks.html "If you did not buy the pBook from manning.com, you can still get the free eBook in all available formats by setting up a Manning account, and registering your copy."

But what professional-quality ebooks are lawfully distributed DRM-free?

There quite a few publishers with "DRM free only" e-books. For example:

http://www.manning.com/
http://oreilly.com/
http://www.linuxjournal.com/

Encourage them if you do not like DRMed books.

Yeah, really. It's not even that great of a deal, in my view. Manning Publications has a deal of the day and you get discounts like this quite often from them (note, I don't work for them, I have just purchased a few of their books). I'm sure others do as well.

A book co-written by a father-son team as the son learns Python programming developing small games
http://www.manning.com/sande/

And when you're done with that, move on to slightly bigger games, still in Python
http://inventwithpython.com/

Absolutely agreed. I just wrote a book on learning to program using graphing calculators as a springboard, entitled "Programming the TI-83 Plus/TI-84 Plus", which ironically ships from the bindery to stores today! I heartily recommend getting kids excited about programming with graphing calculators, and in thirteen years of volunteering my time to the community I've seen hundreds of users become calculator programmers and later engineers or software developers. Sidebar: the LCD is 96x64, or 96x120 on the TI-86.

Get it direct from the publisher- http://www.manning.com/sande/

    They do ebooks right. No DRM and costs less than the physical book (pbook). Also, if you buy the pbook you get the ebook free. Sign up for their daily deal e-mail to see what book is on sale that day. Every day at least one book goes on sale, and sometimes more. Wait long enough and the book you want will go on sale, probably for half price. Their early access program is great, too.

    As for this book, I thought it was well done, but my kids didn't get into it. They didn't express interest up front, though. It was mostly parental pushing/hoping.

Good luck

There seems to be a consensus on Python, which I agree to.
I'd reccomend this book for a kid: http://www.manning.com/sande/
Hello World! Computer programming for kids and other beginners.

It was actually written by a dad and his 12 year old while taching him to program using Python.

Hey Rob,

I don't know you and never met you, but I've been reading Slashdot for over a decade (as my user # will tell you). It's been my home page for forever. I just wanted to let you know how much I have appreciated what you created, and how useful it is. Though I don't always agree with the majority opinion here, I can't tell you how many times Slashdot has been the source of one interesting story after another. I've found it so helpful that I've actually featured it in my book, which should be out in a month (Liferay in Action), as one of the first, if not the first, community blog on the Internet.

So thank you. Thank you for starting Slashdot, for building it into something that could be sustained, and for keeping it going all these years. I wish you much success in the future, both personally and professionally, and am hoping that you find whatever it is that will enable to continue fulfilling your dreams.

--
Rich Sezov

I like the approach taken by the Hello World! book. A nice introduction for beginner programmers to python and eventually gets to GUI stuff, which I never got to do with BASIC on my TRS-80 back in the early 80s...

You need this book: PostGIS in Action

Not having read the O' Reilly book,

I can't draw a comparison between the two, but I have been extremely pleased with "R In Action" by Robert Kabacoff

and it can be found here:

http://www.manning.com/kabacoff/

It's a work in progress, in that some 90% of the book is written. Pre-ordering the electronic version gives you the ability to download chapters as they are written, plus a final e-copy (or hard copy if you pay more) when it's completed.

I have a high degree of familiarity with SPSS and SAS, and am learning R to get around the crazy licensing issues of the aforementioned programs. I have been very pleased with Kabacoff's book, as I had *no* familiarity with R before grabbing "R in Action." The publisher/author support a forum where purchasers can identify errors and/or make suggestions for improvements before the book goes to final press.

Not sure if it is competition for "R in a Nutshell" or simply an additional reference, but worth checking out if you want to learn R. It's been very helpful for me.

jeff

I'll let someone else cover Java & Eclipse, but for Android itself, I can recommend http://www.manning.com/ableson/ - I'm currently reading it and find it good. Keep an eye up for their deals - you can typically get up to 50% off (particularly on PDF versions) if you put yourself on their mailing list and just wait for their offers to tick in. :)

Looks like the stock is getting slim over on Amazon, so if you want to order it still and they're out, hit up the Manning site: http://manning.com/mcanally/ Thanks!

I swear, between O'Reilly's animals and Manning's depictions of people from different eras and cultures, I'd say a picture of a guy with a dead bird tucked in his belt is the most random choice for the cover of a programming book that I've ever seen.

I've been using Ext JS for a little while now and when I went looking for books I saw the reviewed book and another one titled "Ext JS in Action" ( http://manning.com/garcia/ ). I ended up choosing the latter. While it is still in the process of being written the publisher has a early access program that allows you to get the chapters as they are written. I would definitely recommend the book to others interested in learning Ext JS.

Jon Skeet - the "top user who just passed 100k" - is an awesome guy, and that score is well-deserved. I had a pleasure of discussing things with him back when he was inhabiting microsoft.public.dotnet.* newgroups, before he moved on to StackOverflow, and he was already very helpful back then. On SO, with his nigh-unreachable (and steadily growing) score, he quickly got a kind of a cult following.

An interesting background, too. He's working in Google (mostly developing in Java, so far as I know), and at the same time he's the author of one of the best advanced books on C#, and most of his SO answers tend to be C#/.NET related. That book is well worth the read of everyone who has to deal with the tech.

C can be good for introductory programming classes at the college level because it also teaches you about how computers work.... but for kids I think a higher level language like python is a good starting point.

I personally don't like python for numerous personal reasons... but I'm teaching my son Python as his first computer language for the simple reason that there's a very good kid's programming book out there, and it uses python: "Hello World! Computer Programming for Kids and Other Beginners"

link: http://www.manning.com/sande/

The link above has some sample chapters to look at.

I've also set him up with Ubuntu to learn with. Ubuntu has a lot of free educational software (with the edUbuntu bundle), runs very well on a cheap netbook, and the unix security model keeps him from installing tons of junk programs off the web that cripples his computer. Though it would be nice if ubuntu had some of the OS X parental controls... especially with email and chat.

Loading PDFs is trivial. The DX shows up as a standard USB flash drive, allowing you to drag and drop files into its Documents directory from any modern OS.

PDFs display well, though you'll want to turn the DX on its side to more closely approximate the width of a printed page. The DX can't reflow PDF text like it can with standard Kindle books. It became very obvious why Amazon didn't bother with PDF support on their smaller Kindles. Pragmatic Programmers offers their eBooks in .mobi format, so I redownloaded my existing library and copied the files over USB. Serious props to Pragmatic for being so... pragmatic. Manning's PDF books display well. O'Reilly, OTOH, adds huge and extremely obnoxious copyright headers and footers to their Safari PDF downloads that results in the actual book page being shrunk to a small illegible island in the middle of the screen. I've complained to O'Reilly about this, no word back yet. Outside of that inexplicable piece of design dysfunction every PDF I've thrown at the DX has worked well.

If you have trouble with eye strain like I do (Convergence Insufficiency, use the website to direct you to a clueful optometrist if you have trouble staying focused while reading or have vaguely ADD-like symptoms), the non-backlit Kindle screen is VERY nice. It's at least as easy on my eyes as paper, if not moreso due to the font flexibility.

You will want the Mighty Bright LED reading light Amazon recommends (requires 3 AAA batteries, not included), as well as the protective leather cover that Amazon should have included and you'll feel like a schmuck paying $50 for.

The Sprint-driven Whispernet wireless service is excellent. Being able to receive free book samples, read them, then purchase the full book from wherever I am (so long as I don't stray too far from civilization) is dangerously convenient.

I've very glad I waited for the DX over the smaller Kindle 2. If you have the cash, or have simply given up on paying off your credit card, I highly recommend it.

Recently, I came across this book: Hello World!

It's geared towards kids with no programming experience and it uses Python.

(I haven't read it, but I am considering buying it for when my daughter is old enough.)

While TBB give you one option to write C++ code in OO style, Boost.Thread and the upcoming new standard provide a similar API. Although not yet available entirely, this book looks promising to me:

http://www.manning.com/williams/

What's inside:
* When and when not to use concurrency
* Concurrency and multi-threading in C++
* Concurrency support in the New Standard
* How to improve performance with concurrency
* How to manage concurrency
* Problems and solutions in sharing data
* Synchronization and why we need it
* Memory model details

Description (from the website):
With the new C++ Standard and Technical Report 2 (TR2), multi-threading is coming to C++ in a big way. There is a new memory model with support for multiple threads, along with a new multi-threading support library featuring low-level atomic operations, as well as basic thread launching and synchronization facilities. TR2 will provide higher-level synchronization facilities that allow for a much greater level of abstraction, and make programming multi-threaded applications simpler and safer.

C++ Concurrency in Action is the first book to show you how to take advantage of the new C++ Standard and TR2 to write robust multi-threaded applications in C++.

[...]

Um, the features listed by my post's parent.

I don't have time to describe them all in detail here (or, more importantly, how they can improve readability of code) but here are a couple of URLs which give a bit more information:

http://csharpindepth.com/Articles/General/BluffersGuide2.aspx
http://csharpindepth.com/Articles/General/BluffersGuide3.aspx

Shameless plug: for a lot more detail, read C# in Depth... (there are sample chapters available at http://manning.com/skeet)

> it frequently fails to explain the fundamental
> Ruby concepts and structures that it's using.

David Black's Ruby For Rails is a great book for this; David explains the way Rails leverages all sorts of Ruby techniques to do what it does. Another good one is Advanced Rails, which has an excellent section on the changes that Rails makes to various Ruby core classes - e.g., Symbol.to_proc.

This is a pretty common problem. I'd suggest picking up a good book on (**** warning, buzzwords incomming****) SOA/ESB solutions. There are plenty of good, proven patterns to help solve this problem.

Here's a good start:

http://books.google.com/books?id=dH9zp14-1KYC
http://manning.com/rademakers/

Maybe a ./ editor can fix the link in the article for the rest of us ;-)

The publisher link in the article should have been: http://www.manning.com/reiersol/

Thanks in advance

The actual URL is: http://www.manning.com/reiersol/

http://www.manning.com/reiersol/

Perl can be used as a functional language. It can also be used as an object-oriented language, especially if you use a modern OO library instead of the low-level core support for object-oriented development. Perl is also a great structured programing language too, of course.

Other than Systems Programming and Operating Systems, you could use Perl and CPAN to address all of the computer science subjects you mention, and you could use the Inline module and the other modules in its namespace to teach other languages, within the context of a Perl development framework.

I'm not suggesting that universities should switch from all-Java to all-Perl (though doing so would probably improve productivity for most programmers, so long as they're taught to use Best Practices and not create the write-only code that bad/non programmers often create with Perl.) Instead, I'm thinking that an introductory course could teach Perl syntax and best practices, and use that as a basis to provide introductory training in all of the different development styles and subjects you've touched upon. By using one language that is flexible enough to cover this wide variety of material, the topics could be covered without confusing beginning students with a variety of languages.

just that one book and some very basic tutorials.

I haven't seen leaky PKs be too much of an issue. A lot of keys are just local identifiers, or your API should be doing requisite security checks.

The interesting thing is that, although I'm in principle against DRM, the DRM scheme used in these books is so user-friendly.. [y]You can install the software in as many computers and handhelds you wish

Shennanigans, call-eth I.

Can this "user friendly" ebook PDF reader be installed on my Linux-powered laptop? Nope. Screw it then, I'll keep buying my tagged-but-DRM-free eBooks from Manning.

There are a couple of sample chapters available.
http://manning.com/maher/ch03.pdf
is all about using perl as a better grep'ing engine--better in *many* ways. It's 39 pages of goodness, and what convinced me, rather than the review here. YMMV, but I've been burned by portability issues in various flavors of shells, greps, and other tools.

At the moment:
man -k grep |grep ' (1' | wc -l
16
but I've also worked with systems where that would have returned 3--and they were all incompatible with their 'equivalents' on this machine.

Then there are the vast differences in shells, ad nauseum. If you only work with one Unixy OS, it's probably not a big issue for you, though it might still make things easier, depending upon exactly what you do. But many people who've made the intellectual investment to acquire decent bash, awk, and sed skills are also working across disparate environments. Perl can cut down on the combinatorial explosion of syntax differences across the various tools.

I still use grep (and some others) all the time, as in the example above. I'm not arguing that Perl should be treated as a complete replacement for grep and other tools. But it sure can simplify your life, particularly as it's widely installed. For instance, I do a lot of work with minimal or close to minimal (hardened) Linux systems. On some SuSE systems I'm currently dealing with, you don't get Python in that configuration, but you do get Perl.

It's not a perfect solution, by any means. At least one commercial Unix system I have to deal with doesn't provide Perl by default, and policy prevents me from installing it. Some modules on the CPAN are, IMO, crappy enough that I don't *care* whether they're portable. I have other complaints. But there've been many situations where Perl saved either time, or my ass.

BTW, on the site mentioned above, there's an ebook version for $22.50, a source code download, etc. It's worth a look, if for no other reason that the sample chapters are informative and enjoyable.

Ruby for Rails by David A. Black.

And, for the love of god, go with Postgres rather than mysql.

It is a full-featured and low-overhead ORM. Go to http://www.hibernate.org and check out the NHibernate link.

Plus, there are several books avilable from, e.g., O'Reilly, Manning.

Manning Reflection In Action would probably be the book you want

Yep, that book would be Manning's Java Reflection in Action. I read a few chapters and figured out enough to write my own dynamically loaded plugin system for a Java based GUI editor, so I think it covers the topic well enough.

There are a lot of good points posted in here. Caching on the client on the server are two big things for a good application that is using the XHR. A good database design is also key if you do not want to use "like" which slows down the search. In Ajax In Action as discussed on Slashdot here. In chapter 10, the project talks about how to limit post backs with an auto suggest by using the clientside efficiently. The basic idea examines the results returned. If it is under a certain number, it uses JavaScript regular expressions to trim down the dataset instead of hitting the server. Plus there is a limit on number of results returned so it speeds up response time.

One thing I can not get through people's minds enough when I do my talks is Ajax is not going to be a "client-based app" on the web. The main reason is going to be network traffic getting in the way of your request. Imagine a dial up user in India with your server sitting in the United States. The request is going to have to travel to the other side of the world and back with the slow speeds of dial-up. Testing on your localhost is going to look great until you get on an outdated shared server hosting multiple applications with a full network load. Yes we are talking small requests pinging the server, but 1000 users with a 10 letter word could mean death if you designed the system badly!

I love XHR, cough Ajax, but you need to look at what you are dealing with. The design of an XHR app can kill you if you do not think it out fully.

My 2 cents,
Eric Pascarello
Coauthor of: Ajax In Action

OK, I know this isn't much of a deal, but it's still good if you buy a lot of books. If you buy AJAX in Action and another Manning book from major bookstores, you'll get a free AJAX T-shirt. A list of bookstores has been posted.

I don't work for Manning, but I'm so in love with their books. The Java GUI programming book alone is worth a million to me. I refer to it almost everyday. I've looked at similar O'Reilly books and they don't even come close! I'm about to purchase Manning's .NET book pretty soon as well.

Happy reading.

I usually use this board for any questions I have about AJAX or plain old DHTML. One of the moderators is in the process of coauthoring a book about AJAX, and has some blogs on the subject as well.

Manning decided to publish my book in an online pdf format only, since Tim and the others beat me to the market. On the plus side, the book is available to read now, and you only need to buy the chapters that you are interested in rather than the whole book. The book *may* have future updates as well.

I would appreciate if someone would do a review of it here. Since it is not sold on Amazon, I have only had very few feedback comments (all of them good :) ).

Regards, Vikram Goyal

Jakarta Commons Online Bookshelf: http://www.manning.com/goyal

I can't believe a review of a book about Hibernate would not compare it to the book everyone recommends, Hibernate in Action. HiA is a great book, written by people who work on the project, including the lead developer. Of course, this review doesn't have much information that couldn't be obtained from skimming through the table of contents on Amazon.

Of course the web pages are stored locally. Not only are they stored locally, they are also _indexed_, which is what makes searches fast. Think Google - the same type of technology is behind Simpy.

Actually, Simpy uses Lucene [1], a search tool I know a little bit about. [2] (no, this is not a promo)

[1] http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene
[2] http://www.manning.com/hatcher2

Reading them, one gets the feeling that its primary purpose is to allow the author to make some payments on a car or mortgage.

Unless we are talking about a book that really interests a LARGE portion of the geeks out there, the above statement is really missing the point. I don't know any technical book authors who do it for the money. I am certainly not writing for the money. Royalties are nice, but they are really small in the end, especially when you consider the time and effort that you put in writing technical books. In addition, think about the 'life expectancy' of a book that covers a technical topic - not much longer than firefly's.

Long story short, one doesn't write this type of stuff to make money, and Mark certainly didn't write Dive into Python for $$$ - I've had it bookmark in my Simpy account (URL in sig) for 6+ months now. I just wanted to get this straight, so there is no confusion. This may also be interesting to those considering writing a book on a technical topic.

This is interesting. Recently, while writing a chapter about Lucene ports for Lucene in Action, I came across Beagle. Beagle uses one of the Lucene ports (Lucene.Net - the same one used by Lookout, the Outlook search plugin, recently purchased by Microsoft). Since I know it is possible to perform 'more like this' queries with Lucene (I use it on Simpy - URL below), my guess is that Beagle will be able to form similar queries, too.

I wonder if KDE developers should use Lucene or one of its ports under the hood.

Links:
Lucene in Action
Beagle
Lookout
Simpy