From: Bob Hutchison Date: 2007-06-06T22:11:56+09:00 Subject: Re: David Black's book _Ruby for Rails On 5-Jun-07, at 1:10 PM, finetan@hotmail.com wrote: > Hi all > > Anyone of you have read the book, David Black's book _Ruby for Rails? > > I 'd like to know what you think about the book from a professional > perspective. I'm pretty enthusiastic about the book. Ruby for Rails, in my opinion, is targeted at someone who is using Rails already and is feeling that it is time to learn Ruby. The book uses Rails as a guide to explaining Ruby. This is really quite unusual for general programming language books. You normally expect to see this when a PL is explained as an embedded language (autolisp in autocad, mel in Maya, come to mind). Trouble is that these books usually limit themselves to what the author thinks is important in the context (autocad, Maya). David didn't do that. He has managed to provide an excellent how to program in Ruby guide within the context of Rails, not just a how-to-use-ruby-while-working-with-rails book. I think that it is better than that actually, David manages to use the context of Rails to improve the presentation. This makes for a really effective learning experience for people familiar with Rails, and merely a really good experience for everyone else. It has the feel of a well done tutorial. On top of that, there are some really good explanations of interesting aspects of Ruby in the book (e.g. the self/scope discussion, Ruby-style domain specific languages). It doesn't act as a Ruby reference, you'll need the Pickaxe for that. Be aware: I'm quoted on the back of the book Cheers, Bob > > Your insight some might find it useful. > > -Jimmy > > -- > http://www.bestwhy.com > > ---- Bob Hutchison -- tumblelog at Recursive Design Inc. -- weblog at -- works at