From: Marc Heiler Date: 2008-07-06T21:23:39+09:00 Subject: Re: book > I am a C++ and Java developer and I would like to have a look at > ruby in my spare time. Always nice. The more C++/Java people that know ruby at least, the higher the chance Ruby gains more smart people ("smart" in the way as so much "experienced and knowledgable" in general, not so much about being a "genious". I think everyone can learn ruby, no matter how "smart" or "not so smart" one is, I just wanted to emphasize on the technical knowledge aspect part.) > I prefer reading a book to reading online docs (when possible) I feel similar although I think in the not so distant future we might really embrace other technologies. I actually prefer paper for many reasons - my eyes like paper more, I can mark parts with colours, emphasize other parts, scribble things down quickly, am independent of a computer as well... In general I love paper. (Poor them trees, but alas they grow back ;> ) However I do also store knowledge in a non-paper format, and this has a few other advantages. I can search a lot faster for it, I can rearrange the look and feel rather easily, and reassemble the content quite easily too. I hope one day I can combine both, maybe not on paper, but on something that is flexible enough. :-) I think by far the best ruby book is the Pickaxe. Personally I can not recommend any other ruby book. I think there simply are not enough ruby books. Yes, we have a collection of many scripts in the ruby cookbook, but I did not find it as useful as the Pickaxe back then. > Maybe a "Learning Perl for experienced programmers" would > have been the best way to start. I guess so, but the more one learns, the less one can learn from a specific book. It will normally target a bigger audience. I think, honestly, the best way is to just write ruby code in order to learn Ruby. With irb one can easily go through Hash, Array and Strings and learn all these basic operations. Enumerator is important too. I think thats it mostly. Designing simple classes is super-easy as well, and does not require a lot of boilerplate code. I think writing a SMALL game is a good idea, like tic-tac-toe or some other game. (I made my first ruby game too big, i started it 5 years ago... i added a lot of features too quickly, and although it has only 4000 lines of ruby code, I got too bored to actually finish it... :( but I learned from this endeavour. ) > So, I am a bit skeptic about buying "Learning Ruby" as I do > not like to spend money on a book that lasts me 2 days, Then don't ;) I did not buy it and I think it is perfectly fine to write ruby without having lots of books. > For now I am more interested in the language than in Rails, so > I would try and avoid Ruby on Rails books, but if you think > the best introduction to Ruby is a part of a Ruby on Rails book, > then I would could consider one. I bought that "Agile Rails" book... I am not sure if it is good or bad, because I have not finished it :( I think i will not finish it .... maybe I can use it as a reference but compared to Pickaxe, I really hardly have any use for it. (And I do not use the Pickaxe that much anymore, though I plan to buy the latest one once its in print-format. I dont like pdf's, I enjoy spending less time in front of the PC and reading a book is still so much nicer than reading on my monitor) > Ruby has a minimal definition that leads to extremely > expressive programs. You really don't need to read > very much to start using it, and the rest is learning > how to Google for snapshots of Ruby libraries in > action. No book can replace that. I agree basically with that. The best way to really learn Ruby is by: - writing ruby code, even if it is easy - sometimes look into the other people's code (it might be hard to understand, but there will come a time when it is no longer really that difficult to understand.) You just have to embrace that sometimes things can be super-terse and short in Ruby. -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.