From: Phillip Gawlowski <cmdjackryan@...>
Date: 2007-04-24T14:01:52+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby and C

John Joyce wrote:
> get the book by Chris Pine, Learn to Program.

http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/

To sneak a peak, you can find a complete tutorial (I don't have the book 
itself, and thus cannot comment on the completeness of the content in 
comparison to the book) to programming in general and Ruby especially.

Of course, _why's poignant guide shouldn't be amiss in Ruby specific 
tutorials.

> It's cheap and small and interesting. Mr. Pine uses it to teach 
> beginning programming to kids. He chooses to teach them Ruby rather than 
> other languages. Ruby gets out of the way most of the time. It lets you 
> focus on the skill of creating a program. Designing it and testing and 
> running it. In C this is a much more complicated task. If you starting 
> out, C will throw a lot of things at you at once.

I can recommend "C++ for Dummies" if you are new to C/C++. I haven't yet 
had the patience to learn C/C++, though, but found the book a valuable 
resource when I was dabbling in C/C++.
A tidbit of information: C has become a subset of C++, which, upon more, 
introduced OOP to the C world.


> That said, either way you'll be fine, but get yourself a good text 
> editor which does colors and (if possible) auto completion. Learn to use 
> the command line too. Buy a good reference book for Unix.

Look long and hard for a good text editor / IDE (once you know what your 
IDE should be able to do). What works for me, doesn't work for you (I 
don't really like Eclipse, but I like NetBean's Ruby support, for example).

Get used to reading loads of documentation, most of which is dry and 
boring, but packed with information.

Don't just get a Unix book, but install yourself a Linux / Unix derivate 
(Ubuntu is a very good choice if you never, ever touched *nix). Darwin 
(Mac OS X's Unix core) is available as download, too.

-- 
Phillip "CynicalRyan" Gawlowski
http://cynicalryan.110mb.com/
http://clothred.rubyforge.org

Eek! That was supposed to be My Special Law, _MY_ special law, I tell
you!

T/