From: "Avdi B. Grimm" <avdi@...>
Date: 2001-10-22T08:23:24+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:22916] Re: I need some help!!

On Sun, 2001-10-21 at 17:36, Massimiliano Mirra wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 21, 2001 at 11:34:16PM +0900, Avdi B. Grimm wrote:
> > the works besides that one?  Has anyone considered doing a Ruby port of
> > "Thinking Like a Computer Scientist"?  I've only glanced over it, but it
> > seems like a good intro to programming; and it's already available in (I
> 
> I glanced over one as well (the C++ one) and it looked like the usual
> list of language features explained one after another, with very
> little concerning ``how to think'' or what to use them for.  That is,
> yet another learn-a-language rather than learn to program.  Was I
> mistaken completely and is it worth a closer look?

I got the impression in my perusal that it was written by a real live
computer scientist, and focused a lot more on the CS view of the world
rather than intro books.  For one thing, it apparently wasn't too hard
to port it to other languages, so it isn't too language-bound.  IIRC,
the author(s) note that the Python version has a whole lot less
"language overhead" than the C++ or Java ones. So you might want to
take a look at that one.  On the other hand, maybe I got a false
impression... I'll have to look again.

Frankly, just about anything's better than the crappy "Learning C/C++
with Turbo C" books we used in my college courses, which made no effort
to differentiate between the C++ language and the programming
environment; and focused more on how to get a linked list sorted than
on how to model a problem in terms of objects.

~Avdi