From: "Achim Domma (SyynX Solutions GmbH)" <achim.domma@...>
Date: 2005-10-18T03:01:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby for Python/OO developer

Peter Burns wrote:

> I was in the same boat as you Achim, experienced Python guy who got
> into Ruby because of Rails.  Now it's my favorite language.

Interesting to here, that there are developers which converted from 
python to ruby. The syntax looks a little bit scaring to me. In this 
point I wonder about myself, because I was a hardcore-C++-template-guy 
for many years before I stared using python more and more.

 > I learned
> on Agile Web Development and The Pickaxe, but there's definitely a lot
> of the Pickaxe that I skimmed past.

They look quite good, but I hesitate to buy two expensive books, just to 
give Rails a try.

>  The most important section for
> you is probably the one on blocks.  Beyond that, you might want to run
> through the section on Regular Expressions pretty quickly, as the
> syntax may be a bit unfamiliar, specifically String.scan.  Play around
> with rubygems and irb (equivalent to the python interactive shell). 
> Oh, and a couple things that will be helpful to pick up rails quickly:
> 
> Things that begin with a colon, e.g. :action, or :controller, are
> symbols, which are similar to Strings, save that they're more
> efficient for certain comparison operations.  That and method calls
> like has_and belongs_to_many in class definitions are actually methods
> that tend to modify the class definition that they're in.

That was just the kind of information I was looking. Thanks a lot. I'll 
have a look at the points you mentioned.

regards,
Achim