From: Garry Freemyer Date: 2009-07-15T00:24:28+09:00 Subject: Re: Twelve rules of Ruby. --0-1226536837-1247585065=:22756 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii ________________________________ From: David A. Black To: ruby-talk ML Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 2009 7:43:56 AM Subject: Re: Twelve rules of Ruby Hi -- http://www.manning.com/black2 :-) I suppose I'm very teaching-oriented, in the sense that I'm mainly interested in "rules" for understanding and using Ruby successfully. I don't think there's that much point making a list of how self works[1] in the absence of explaining why (at least in part) it's important to understand it. Of course, there are no twelve rules. Better is for everyone to interpret the invitation how they see fit. We don't have to (and won't, and can't) reach some kind of twelve-rule consensus. That's a red herring. David [1] In a method definition, it's the object that received the message. In a or module class definition body, outside of a method definition, it's the class or module object. At the top level, it's a special "backstop" object called "main". In an instance_eval or instance_exec block, it's the receive of the instance_eval message. In a class_/module_eval block, it's the class or module object. That's off the top of my head (too lazy to look at the book sitting next to me :-) but I think that's about it. -- David A. Black / Ruby Power and Light, LLC Ruby/Rails consulting & training: http://www.rubypal.com Now available: The Well-Grounded Rubyist (http://manning.com/black2) Training! Intro to Ruby, with Black & Kastner, September 14-17 (More info: http://rubyurl.com/vmzN) -- END of David's Reply. Yep, I suspected myself that trying to state the rules might make a tome of a rule ... but those rules there are also worth the price of admission, Now i know what self is. Just for curiosity I looked up the etiology of red herring and got this ... http://ask.yahoo.com/20010718.html I looked at the book online with interest. One of the frustrations for me is that I have some older books on Ruby I bought a few years ago ... I got one that tells the student to try to implement something, and mentions that it is easy to do it wrong, but the author never explains what he thinks is the "Right" way of doing things. Now that I am laid off and urgently adding Ruby to my set of programmer skills, things in these books simply do not work any more and I am left to guess around trying to get things working. Example: I am following an example from the book Ruby from novice to Professional .. and I am directed to use scaffolds to create my working project, but the procedure does not create a working program any more (The scaffold does NOT pick up the fields in the record, so trying to create a new record, just shows the header, the save button and the back button. Neither me, nor my friend who has for years been making a living programming Rails and Ruby from his living room knows if this is a bug or an intentional change, or if there is some new syntax to make scaffold create a complete scaffold instead of a ladder with no rungs. The reason I bring this frustration out, is I am interested in finding a book that doesn't leave me in the lurch of having to make guesses with no guidance, and where the examples work with the current version of ruby in wide use today. Surprises are like being in a dark cave and having your flashlight go out without warning. My rails is 2.3.2 and Ruby version 1.8.6 --0-1226536837-1247585065=:22756--