From: Chris Gehlker <canyonrat@...>
Date: 2002-11-05T06:36:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Stupid Newbie Question.


On Monday, November 4, 2002, at 02:20 PM, Sean Armstrong wrote:

> Briefly looking at the coding examples for Ruby, it looks like Ruby 
> takes alot of the best qualities from Perl, Python, and TCL.
>
> Knowing some of these languages, especially Python, would it be pretty 
> easy to pick up Ruby?
>

I found Ruby very easy. It feels more like ObjC or even Smalltalk when 
you get into it.
> Does Ruby work well with CGI?
>
Yes
> Does Ruby play nicely with Macs? Especially OSX?
>

If you have Jag, you already have it. Try "ruby -v" in terminal. Then 
check out RubyCocoa and RubyAEOSA.

> On another note, the only tutorials I have seen are the Ruby Guide 
> (which is rather quaint) and The Pragmatic Programmer. I also saw 
> O'reilly's Ruby in a nutshell but it did not look like it contained 
> any more in depth than the online ruby guide. Is there any more 
> documentation out there? Especially online tutorials?
>
You have to just get the "PickAxe Book" (prag programmer) and jump in.

> One different note:
> Is there a way to document and then read the documentation in the 
> modules? For example, help in the python interactive reads off the 
> module documentation and Perl has perldoc. Anything similar in Ruby?

Yep. There are a few alternatives. It's a religious issue.

> Thanks for letting me indulge myself here.

Feel free.