From: Brett McCormick Date: 2002-01-17T07:14:58+09:00 Subject: Re: ruby docs (and weird error) I've already got the pragmatic programmers guide, which is a great book but a little light on specifics. It would also be great if it had a list of error messages as some of them can be quite cryptic. For example, the following code: a = 1; class < > What is the definitive ruby book? The oreilly book or the pragmatic > > programmers book? > > The O'Reilly "Ruby in a Nutshell" book is a typical O'Reilly nutshell guide. > It's very terse and doesn't provide much, if any, example code. > > I seem to enjoy the Pragmatic book more than "The Ruby Way," but I think > that's a personal thing. If you can get to a store that has them, I'd get > all the Ruby books and sit down for a while with them and buy the ones that > seem to work for you. For example, "The Ruby Way" has an excellent > introduction to Ruby even though it's not an introductory book. > > Personally, I could have saved the money and just gotten the Pragmatic > "Programming Ruby" book, but I ordered "The Ruby Way" and the Nutshell guide, > unseen. I do look things up in the Nutshell guide. It's handy and thin, > easy to work with. "The Ruby Way" is a great source of examples of how to > accomplish typical DP tasks in Ruby, and it would probably be essential if > you were coding a large system that needed to accomplish a variety of things. > > Eirikur > >