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.'"

Comments

I hate to say it, but I like it.

[daviddennis]

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

Classic, huh?

[snjoseph]

Methinks, perchance, no. Maybe I'm a just curmudgeon (at 23! not bad!), but I do like to think that programming is a serious technical art based in serious science, not the electronic equivalent of making a zine. There's a certain value in acting like what we do is actually a real profession, not something just any teen can accomplish with enough M&Ms, Jolt Cola, and "sassy" instructional cartoons.

OK, I'm definitely a curmudgeon. Still I think I'm right.

Re:seems like an odd choice

[SandSpider]

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