From: "F. GEIGER" Date: 2001-09-23T11:42:16+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:21562] Re: Ruby/objects book in style of The Little Lisper I really enjoyed reading the 1st chapter of your book and wouldn't have stopped if there would have been more chapters of it. A very interesting approach. As a C/VB/VC++/Python programmer never been in touch with Scheme, Lisp, Smalltalk,... I never read a book written in this style. A vivid and appealing manner to teach Ruby. Very promising. Keep up the good work! Cheers Franz "Brian Marick" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:5.1.0.14.0.20010919152224.02dc7c40@mail48727.popserver.pop.net... > 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: > > 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 > >