From: BearItAll <bearitall@...>
Date: 2005-08-30T17:31:23+09:00
Subject: [OT] Pragmatic programmers

Hello

Just for those of you who have gone through various tutorials on ruby
and/or Rails. But don't feel like you've come away with quite enough
information to do anything more than a few basic utilities. Also, like I
did, you might view some areas of Ruby with a touch of scepticism.

The Pragmatic Programmers guide is the next part of the puzzle. I think it
was right to do other tutorials first, before getting the book or pdf,
because although the book starts by assuming a new user of the language,
it is much more pleasant to work through if you already have some ground
work done.

It is well written, doesn't go off into waffle land like many a
programming book does, which is often done to disguise a section the
writer doesn't really understand. This book just tells you what is what
and why.

The tricky part for myself with Ruby was it's class system. Coming from
C++ it seemed a very messy error-prone way of object building from
classes. The book sorted that part out in my mind, cleared up the blocks
system too, I had a feeling they would be more to it than the tutorials
had been telling me.

Anyway, I promise I have nothing to do with the writing or distribution of
this book, I am writing this to the group simply because over just one
weekend it has cleared up a lot of areas of Ruby that I was unsure of or
mistrusted.

http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/ruby/index.html

I got the pdf version. The odd bit is that I seemed to remember that the
Adobe Reader let you add notes and your own bookmarks, but I downloaded
Adobe Reader 7 for linux and it hasn't either of those.