From: Dave Howell <groups@...>
Date: 2006-01-20T08:22:20+09:00
Subject: Re: My Thought on the "Pickaxe book" (from a Ruby novice)


On Jan 19, 2006, at 8:07, Gennady Bystritsky wrote:

> But there're not THAT many ways to do something even in Ruby,

Have you been paying any attention to this maillist? Oh, my gosh. The 
recent thread about counting unique elements in an array generated an 
armload of possibilities, all different, for example. Some people will 
do Regex magic, others use .inject or some tricky form of .each. One 
person uses symbolic hashes, another adds a new method to the class.

I must agree; the Pickaxe book is a great reference but a lousy 
tutorial. I don't *want* to learn the nine ways to iterate. I want to 
learn one, so I can move on to other ideas. If I spend a lot of time 
iterating, THEN I'll go read the later chapter on iterating and find 
the shorter, quicker, less-typing way of doing it. But if I get them 
all at once, I can't even figure out which one to use until I've 
figured them all out, and to then discover that they're all the same 
dang thing is just exasperating.

I don't need && and "and" because i already know how to use 
parentheses, for example. The key lessons and important concepts are 
lost in the noise of learning nine ways to do the same thing.

Well, I'm sure somebody's going to write the "Learn Ruby in 14 days" 
book or the "Ruby for Dummies" book or something else, and the Pickaxe 
book can just be The Reference Book.