[ruby-talk:11303] Re: Programming Ruby is now online

Dave Thomas <[e-mail]> writes:

> A first version of the book Programming Ruby is now available, both
> online and for download.

To borrow a phrase I came across in your book:  Domo arigato gozaimasu !

[for those, like me, unfamiliar with Japanese, a Japanese friend explained
 the nuances to me as:

    "Domo arigato gozaimasu" means "Thank you very much." It is a polite and
     formal expression. You can say, "Arigato gozaimasu", "Domo arigato",
     "Arigato", or just "Domo". The most polite expression is "Domo arigato
     gozaimasu". The degree of politeness become less towards "Domo", but
     the meaning is the same. When you want to express your appreciation to
     someone, you can use one of them according to the situation where you
     are. If he or she is familiar to you, the less formal and polite one is
     used. If not, a polite and formal one is better."
]

Needless to say the availability of good documentation (free or otherwise)
can make or break a language.  Perl has been very good at it with perldoc
and the Python folks have done a great job in keeping their online
documentation in sync with each new release.  Apart from the inherent merits
of the Ruby itself and the wonderful online community, if (or should it be
when?) Ruby catches on big time in the West a major part of the credit will
definitely go to the early occurrence of such an excellent book.

Regarding the discussion of precedents, Three come to mind:

. Guy Steele, made the TeX-able source of the entire 1000 odd page 2nd
  edition of "Common Lisp: the language" (Digital press) publically
  available in the early 90s.  After the Web took off it was converted to
  HTML.  Both this and Kent Pitman's Common Lisp hyper reference are
  indispensable for anybody developing in Common Lisp.
     http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Web/Groups/AI/html/cltl/cltl2.html
     http://www.xanalys.com/software_tools/reference/HyperSpec/ 
  The hyperspec is essentially the ANSI reference for CL.  (Incidentally CL
  was the first OO language to attain ANSI standardization.)

. Few years back, Kent Dybvig (author of the leading Scheme implementation,
  Chez Scheme), placed the second edition of his "The Scheme programming
  language" (Prentice Hall) on the web (www.scheme.com). This would be
  Scheme's equivalent of K&R.  (Dybvig has done an excellent job in his TeX
  to html translation.)

. Bruce Eckel (of "Thinking in Java/C++" fame), has placed the original MS
  Word source (as well as other formats) of his recent books on his Web site
  -before- publication.  The pre-publication release has helped him polish
  his books and debug the prose and code.  Inspite of the MS Word source
  continuing to be available even after the book was formally published
  (Prentice Hall) his books continue to be best sellers garnering various
  awards from the Java/C++ community.  IIRC, in one of his interviews he
  mentions that he feels that having the online versions available has
  actually helped to -increase- sales as many people having discovered the
  excellence of his books via the online versions, then want the advantages
  of hard copy.

  It would not be surprisingly if the same thing happened with Programming
  in Ruby too --- more people will get over the initial hump of exploring a
  new language and those serious about Ruby development will probably buy
  the book any way.

Regards,
Raja