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Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby by genner · 2008-12-23 08:42 · Score: 1 · on Your Favorite Tech / Eng. / CS Books?

The author even made the online version free. http://poignantguide.net/

Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby by partenon · 2008-12-10 20:15 · Score: 1 · on Best Introduction To Programming For Bright 11-14-Year-Olds?

Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby is a good introduction to programming. It is fun to read and the nature of the Ruby language gives the "instant gratification" that everyone (specially kids) needs.

For ruby by Anonymous Coward · 2008-09-18 04:21 · Score: 0 · on Best Reference Site For Each Programming Language?

Not the best reference, but damn entertaining. Even includes a soundtrack.

Why's poignant guide to ruby

Ruby by magus_melchior · 2008-09-17 13:06 · Score: 1 · on Best Reference Site For Each Programming Language?

In case no one's posted them yet:

Ruby home page, for starters.
RubyDoc, especially the Pragmatic Programmer's Guide with some excellent examples for those getting started.
Why's Poignant Guide, an offbeat way to get started.

Ti-89! by Crazyswedishguy · 2008-07-22 00:22 · Score: 1 · on How To Encourage a Young Teen To Learn Programming?

Strangely enough, the first programming I learned was on a Texas Instruments Ti-89 scientific calculator. I wasn't even sure in what language I was programming in, but I found some games (generally text-based RPGs) and science programs (math or physics) and decided to understand what was going on. Soon I was making my own RPG (never completed it but I learned a lot) and my own math/physics programs.
I won't say this is the best way to learn programming, but everyone has a different introduction, and this one definitely piqued my interest enough to take a computer science class in college (which I loved).

On a somewhat unrelated note, there's a great book that may get him interested in Ruby: Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby. Maybe give that a try.

Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby by matvei · 2008-07-21 23:54 · Score: 1 · on How To Encourage a Young Teen To Learn Programming?

Just point him to Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. That shouldn't be too boring. I enjoy reading just for its style, even though I already know Ruby :-)

Here be Dragons by remitaylor · 2008-03-03 15:05 · Score: 2, Interesting · on The Ruby Programming Language

Depends on what you mean by "normal Ruby." Because Ruby is so flexible, it's a great language for writing domain-specific languages (DSLs). You could argue that these aren't "normal Ruby" because they're specific to certain libraries/gems, but ... they really are just Ruby.

Take this bit of Ruby code, from _why's poignant guide to ruby ...
class Dragon < Creature life 1340 # tough scales strength 451 # bristling veins charisma 1020 # toothy smile weapon 939 # fire breath end
or checkout some Ruby code, using Markaby ... ( also written by _why )
html do head do title 'Ruby is Fun' link :rel => 'stylesheet', :type => 'text/css', :href => '/style.css' end body do p flash[:notice], :style => "color: green" self << @content_for_layout end end

... is that conventional Ruby? Well ... it's plain-old Ruby ... it's just uses Ruby's meta-programming magic to make DSLs. Ofcourse, DSLs aren't always what you may want, but Ruby is really, really great at making them, so you can make your code better represent what you're really programming. Like the Dragon class above ... if you've got lots of creature classes in your application, isn't that a nice and clean example of some syntax you could use?

Ofcourse, cleverness isn't good simply for cleverness' sake. If a DSL really helps, or using some other Ruby "magic," then you should use it ... but these things shouldn't be used just because you can. It can lead to overly complicated code.

Re:Thanks for the review! by davidflanagan · 2008-03-03 10:42 · Score: 5, Informative · on The Ruby Programming Language

Well whilst the author is here, and while I'm part way through the book, let me ask a couple of questions. I should preface this by saying that I think Javascript the Definitive Guide made me hate Javascript all the more, while Java in a Nutshell and Java Examples in a Nutshell seemed to exemplars of good programming books. So needless to say I've puzzled over David's writing over the last few years. Why do I have such mixed feelings about books by the same author? I still don't know but maybe the following questions will help. Have you read the JavaScript book recently? The 5th edition is an improvement over the fourth... It is different than Java in a Nutshell--simply because it is a "definitive guide" rather than a "nutshell". This Ruby book is probably more like my JavaScript book than my Java books, so if you end up liking it well enough, maybe you'll give the JavaScript book another chance :-)

I was reading along today when I came to this: "Assignment to a constant that already exists causes Ruby to issue a warning. Ruby does execute the assignment, however, which means that constants are nor really constant." Now this is a bit of a surprising statement. Isn't this an elephant in the room? Shouldn't it get more of an explanation? Frankly, I don't know the reason that constants are not constant. I could have pressed Matz to enlighten us on this point, but I suspect that the answer is not a simple one and would have been difficult to explain. In earlier drafts of the book I did actually draw attention to these rough spots in the language because they did, indeed, seem strange to me. As I spent more time with Ruby, however, I came to appreciate it more, and re-reading my drafts I felt I was being unnecessarily critical of the language I was documenting. So, as you surmise, I was left just being matter-of-fact about it.

A few pages further on, while discussing parallel assignment, we get this: "a,(b,(c,d)) = [1,[2,[3,4]]] # Parens: a=1; b=2;c=3;d=4". Now I can figure out what is happening and what the book is trying to explain. But at the same time the book seems to ignore a second elephant in the room. Why in the world would someone ever write just a difficult to comprehend statement? Is is a common Ruby idiom? If so might it not be wise to offer some explanation of why it's an idiom? This is not a very common idiom, nor is it even very well known. The particular line of code you cite is, of course, extreme: I'm taking the destructuring parallel assignment syntax to an unreasonable level of nesting to test the reader's understanding of the concept. Its not a common idiom, but it is part of the language, so I document it. It actually seems pretty cool to me, not really an elephant in the room. In this case, were I writing a less formal book, I might have commented on how cool it is. In the same way, in a less formal book, I could have commented on how strange it is that constants can have their values changed.

And one last, sort of unrelated question: is anyone else disappointed by the drawings? When I read that the book would be illustrated by whytheluckystiff I thought that this would make a probably good book even better. But I find them very disappointing and far less visually interesting than what can be found on whytheluckystiff's web site. Please keep in mind that we had to get these drawings through the internal bureaucracy at O'Reilly--we were asking a lot of the production and design teams to include them. I shouldn't speak for _why, but I think his goal for these drawings was to keep it mellow, and to be stylistically distinct from his work for the Poignant Guide.

Re:Documentation by thePsychologist · 2007-08-06 10:26 · Score: 1 · on Creative Documentation

I agree completely. Documentation needs to be clear without any extra frills like stories and poems.

However, there's a difference between the essential documentation and supplementary instruction manuals.

The essential documentation needs to have everything in it and be clear and well organized, and hence it will be extremely boring. A supplementary instructional manual on the other hand like this one for Ruby has the ability to capture the reader's interest in a way documentation can't.

I would very much like more guides and tutorials to be as entertaining as possible, while still having the basic boring trusty documentation to go back to when I need it.

Ruby? by notorious+ninja · 2007-08-06 08:45 · Score: 1 · on Creative Documentation

will making documentation more entertaining actually work to get people to read it?

see: http://poignantguide.net/ruby/

For fun? yes. For work? not really a choice there!

Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby by dgp · 2007-08-06 08:41 · Score: 4, Interesting · on Creative Documentation

the king of off-beat technical documentation is Why's Poignant Guide to ruby.

Re:Try Why the Lucky Stiff's guide by partenon · 2007-04-23 08:14 · Score: 2, Insightful · on Beginning Ruby

+1 on this. Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby is the best tech book I've ever read. I just wish it was available when I was a newb. Why's book is not finished yet, but one can easily learn the basic programming concepts. CHUNKY BACON!! :-)

Re:Yes, but it's rails... ;) by Serious+Callers+Only · 2007-02-26 19:05 · Score: 1 · on Rails Cookbook

Ruby or Python are probably the best places to start; they're not going to be suitable for every type of programming you do, but they might teach you some good habits before you learn other languages with horrific syntax and dangerous pointers, and you can get going very quickly.

For Ruby, there's Chris Pine's Learn to Program or Why the Lucky Stiff's Poignant Guide to Ruby which is whimsical, but does pretty much the same thing, or just go to Try Ruby and type help.

For Python there's Instant Hacking, or Useless Python and I'm sure many others. These two sites, like the Rails site, are written in PHP, but I wouldn't touch PHP with a barge-pole if you're learning just now, it's only useful for web apps and will teach you bad habits.

Re:Yes, but it's rails... ;) by farker+haiku · 2007-02-26 14:56 · Score: 1 · on Rails Cookbook

The answer is of course Ruby. You can start with Chris Pine's Learn to Program which walks you through the basics of Ruby programming, or for a more psychedelic way of learning programming there is always Why's poignant guide to ruby. Then when you get advanced enough (you've read the pickaxe and possibly the ruby way) you can start working on the bi-weekly Ruby Quiz. /ruby fanboy

Re:As a longtime(past tense) PHP developer I can s by LuckyStarr · 2007-02-12 10:02 · Score: 1 · on PHP 5 in Practice

Well, theres why's (poignant) guide to ruby which is licensed under creative commons. So it could be that somebody made a book on demand out of it. Personally I used "Programming Ruby" of which the first edition is also available online. "Rails Recipes" is a very good reference book for repeating patterns using Ruby on Rails. Rails though also has it's annoyances so I am trying to find an excuse to build something with Django and Python.

PHP, Perl, Ruby by LuckyStarr · 2007-01-14 04:16 · Score: 1 · on Lisp and Ruby

I used to do PHP. Black days really. In retrospect I can no longer understand how I could stand it at all. I wasted so much time on idiosyncrasies of the interpreter it hurts to think about it. Ever wondered why your variables suddenly, unexpectedly changed only to find out some nutter activated register_globals on this particular installation. Btw. try this: if ("0" == false) print "This sucks!";

Then I really discovered Perl5. Played with it before, but never really used it much. Anonymous subs! Closures! Regexp operators! Construct code at runtime! I got to appreciate the simplicity of Perl, though the sigils (\%@) drove me crazy at times. I also enjoyed Perl golfing a lot, though not at a very high level. ;-)

Then came along Ruby. I loved it instantly! It was how Perl should have been. It also has probably the best introduction to it of ANY language. Check it out, it's worth it.

Regarding things I really love in Ruby: Blocks and Rubys Object system. Through these two things you can write code without temporary variables. Functional programming sneaked up on me through the backdoor. :-) It's really nice. No side effects. Compare that to PHP!

Interrestingly - Perl6 got much more like Ruby, and adds tons of new stuff (Rules, etc.) I did not fully explore it, but intend to. I did not find a suitable entry into it yet.

The only sad thing is, knowing Ruby I today have no strong drive to learn Python though very interresting projects (OLPC) use it. Perhaps OLPC will get my point of entry for Python.