From: Clifford Heath Date: 2008-03-10T09:46:51+09:00 Subject: Re: The Ruby Programming Language - what are your thoughts? Dave Thomas wrote: > I think it's great that we now have books that suit different people. I was more forceful than I needed to be. The problem I have with the Pickaxe is not that any part of it is either useless or badly written, but that it tries to be five different kinds of book in one, and just ends up as a mess. You never know where to look to find what you want. There's something for everyone in there, but I'd prefer three books; a language reference (The RPL), a good API reference, and a tutorial for those that want one (not me). The reference section of the original Pickaxe was great, and I still use the free HTML version (with the one page index that covers most of the core libraries; much easier to use than ruby-doc) but there are way too many pages devoted to niche libraries in the latest Pickaxe. I think there's real scope for a good API reference book, preferably in two volumes; core classes (String up to Net::) and others (RexML, etc). Just look at the class list of ruby-doc.org and select 30 classes as core, leave the rest in the 2nd volume, or at least in "section 2" of the single volume. Just as long as you don't have 1200 classes all lumped together as in .