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Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby
Colonel Panic writes "Why the lucky stiff has written one of the most unusual (and poignant) books about programming that I've ever encountered. The best description for it so far (seen on comp.lang.ruby) is that it's sort of like 'The Little Prince meets SICP'. However, it defies all attempts at description (at least in this small space), you've got to read it for yourself. Like SICP, the full text is available for free. This one is destined to become a classic - it will likely be known to future generations of jobless American computer scientists as 'The Fox Book.'"
It's amusing. I laughed several times. It's definitely different. Obnoxious, sometimes, but different in a cool sort of way.
... ?
Ruby seems like Perl, written to be a lot less obscure and much more object-oriented. Cool. And the style reminds me a bit of Mr Bunny's Guide to ActiveX. If you liked his book, you should read that too, whether you're interested in ActiveX or not.
But the non-existance of Chapter 4, just after the book started to get into the meat of things, was a bit of a non-starter.
I guess it will be ready for Slashdot in, well, six months.
Or twelve?
Or
I guess it's up to the LuckyStiff. Maybe he's doing luckier stuff nowadays.
D
OK, I'm definitely a curmudgeon. Still I think I'm right.
Altogether, Ruby just seems like an odd choice when it comes to really caring about teaching people to program. Not a bad choice, but not clearly better than the more obvious choices either.
The one advantage that Ruby has over Smalltalk and Logo is that it's included with every copy of OS X. So is Perl, but please, please, please nobody teach children to program using Perl. It could doom us all!
Python is included with OS X as well, so that would be a fine alternative. Me, I like Ruby. Just because.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
There was Mr. Bunny's Big Cup 'O Java, too, which I ran across when a guy I worked with got a pre-publication review copy.
It was... entertaining, from what I recall, but I wouldn't recommend it for learning Java (well, it's out of date now anyway). But the main problem was that the book often sacrificed precision and accuracy for humor, and would have led to some strange misconceptions about Java, for a beginner reading it.
This book looks interesting, though I only skimmed the beginning (gotta get back to work) -- I'd be interested to hear a review from someone who really knows Ruby. Would it really be useful for someone learning the language, or is it better for getting people interested (...and convincing them to find a book with a more direct approach to actually learn the practical stuff)?
Here's the Mr. Bunny home page, anyway.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
I'm already proficient in Ruby, and therefore learned nothing new from the Poignant Guide, but it was an amusing read nonetheless. I greatly enjoyed it, and have already recommended it to my coworkers and my wife. Even if you don't like Ruby, the available chapters are worth reading. I'm looking forward to the completion of the remainder of the book.
Ruby likes to pretend it's some kind of Smalltalk successor. It isn't. Ruby is a Perl successor that borrowed a few tidbits from Smalltalk.
:)
A good observation. Ruby is definately not a Smalltalk successor, although it is a nicer language (on paper->in my head) than Python or Perl is, at least to me. But it has nothing to compell me from switching to it from Smalltalk. And when I want to do a task that Ruby would be a tiny bit better, I just use Perl anyway. More fun, somehow- at least to me.
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