From: Brian Marick <marick@...>
Date: 2001-09-20T06:19:44+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:21413] Ruby/objects book in style of The Little Lisper

I fell in love with Lisp in the early 80's. Back then, I read a book called 
The Little Lisper, which I also loved. It's an interesting book, in that 
some people love it and some people hate it. It crams a lot of information 
into a deceptively simple dialogue style, and always skates just this side 
of being too cute. (At least, those who like it think so.)

A while back, I started thinking of writing a book about objects in this 
style. It would get as deeply into objects as The Little Lisper does into 
recursion and lambda. So I want to start at the beginning and end with 
advanced metaclass hackery and things like first-class continuations. Ruby 
would be an ideal language for the book, even better than Smalltalk, so the 
tentative title is A Little Ruby, A Lot of Objects.

The question is: can I pull it off? To see, I wrote the first chapter, 
which you can find here:
<http://www.visibleworkings.com/little-ruby/Chapter1.pdf>
If you also liked The Little Lisper, I'd be happy if you took a look at my 
chapter and gave me your opinion:

1) I'm trying to come close to TLL's gently whimsical tone. Have I got it?

2) Does the chapter show evidence that I can make a book build in the
    way that TLL does?

Please be frank. Writing in this style is surprisingly hard, so I want to 
stop now if I'm not up to it.

Thank you. If I decide to continue, I'll ask (on a separate mailing list 
that I'll set up) for topics/hacks to be sure to include.

--
Brian Marick, marick@testing.com
www.testing.com - Software testing services and resources
www.testingcraft.com - Where software testers exchange techniques
www.visibleworkings.com - Adequate understanding of system internals