From: Justin Collins <justincollins@...>
Date: 2011-03-16T16:36:34+09:00
Subject: [OT] Re: 2011: Which Ruby books have you read? And which would you recommend?

On 03/15/2011 09:01 PM, Josh Cheek wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 9:46 PM, 7stud --<bbxx789_05ss@yahoo.com>  wrote:
>
>    
>> The word "metaprogramming" as used here really means "dynamic"
>> programming, which I would define as programming in situations when you
>> have a variable name, method name, or class name as a string and you
>> want to do something to the actual variable, method, or class.  The book
>> contains a good explanation of the class structure in ruby, and how to
>> keep track of what 'self' refers to.
>>
>>
>>      
> "Dynamic programming" is already defined, though, it's an approach to
> writing algorithms. I think it's not a very fitting name for that, and think
> your definition is hinting at a much more useful concept, but nonetheless it
> is claimed.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming
>    

It is a pretty unfortunate name with an odd story behind it: 
http://www.eng.tau.ac.il/~ami/cd/or50/1526-5463-2002-50-01-0048.pdf 
<http://www.eng.tau.ac.il/%7Eami/cd/or50/1526-5463-2002-50-01-0048.pdf>

-Justin