From: Justin Collins <justincollins@...>
Date: 2010-10-20T04:02:29+09:00
Subject: Re: For the Ruby Newbie (?) with programming experience

Don Norcott wrote:
> I have had exposure to multiple programming languages and have made a
> lot of wrong assumptions about code snippets I was looking at while
> attempting to get a handle on Ruby.
>
> The Ruby Tutorial at this site is not a typical tutorial.  It is short
> and more like a collection of highlights (with code snippets) of the
> ruby language.
>
> I found it immensely useful it relating ruby to other languages I was
> familiar with.
>
>      http://www.fincher.org/tips/Languages/Ruby/
>
>  Did a search on URL so do not believe this has been posted before.
>
>   

This is a decent resource, but just beware that some of it is 
non-idiomatic or misleading (in my opinion). For example, why is the 4th 
example using global variables? In the 12th example, why are there 
blocks after "if"?

Some of the file examples do not close the file and while this is 
addressed, none of the examples use the much more common

File.open "filename" do |f|
    ...
end

which ensures the file is closed for you.


In example 22, there is this:

rescue TruncatedDataError #the last read had less chars than specified
   #print the rest of the data.  $! is the exception.
   # ".data" has the extra bytes
   print $!.data.gsub(/</,"\r\n<") 

I have never seen $! used, especially in this situation where one would typically see

rescue TruncatedDataError => err
    print err.data.gsub(/</,"\r\n<")
 

In example 37, the code shown is

require 'startClicker'


when you should almost never be seeing camelcase for file names. (JRuby 
_might_ be the exception)

I don't mean to pick on the author of the page (clearly they put a lot 
of work into this), I just want you to be careful when emulating the 
code on there.

-Justin