From: Ruby Freak <twscannell@...>
Date: 2008-05-16T23:30:03+09:00
Subject: Re: PickAxe tutorial (was What is the bes Ruby's book for beginners?)

Dave,
First let me say "Thank you" for your contributions to Ruby and Rails.
We wouldn't be where we are without your work.
That said, the biggest problem I had with both of your books was the
implied assumption that the reader was coming intact with prior
programming skills in PERL, PHP, C++ etc. It is a difficult decision
for any teacher to pick a target audience. Do you go for the raw
beginner and bore the advanced reader or assume a certain level of
skill and overwhelm the pure newbie. This problem is true in any
scholastic endeavor.
One method for explaining complex subjects is to have an advanced text
and a "companion" that explains the fine points. While reading
"Pickaxe", I very often found myself confused by the sample code. You
would be talking about one subject and give a eight line piece of
sample code that used GSUB and regex  and several other methods that
an experienced programmer would understand, but I didn't. So there I
am Googling GSUB and other stuff and it takes me 4 hours to figure out
the sample.
Having a "Companion" web page with a wiki or blogger style discussion
for each page would have been very helpful for me. I think the site
would be self sustaining by the community just as this site is. In
fact, I guess you could simply start a Google Group for each title/
edition and users could simply create each topic as a page number,
like "Page 268" and then readers could go to that discussion and
search for it too.

Just my 2 cents

TW Scannell