From: Lyle Johnson <lyle@...>
Date: 2002-11-14T23:39:55+09:00
Subject: Re: What's your favorite Ruby book?

Michael C. Libby wrote:
> On Wednesday 13 November 2002 09:57, Tim Hunter wrote:
>> If you're a serious Ruby developer, you'll need _The Ruby Way_
> 
> Can you explain this further? Maybe I'm not serious enough about Ruby
> development, but I've taken several ganders at "The Ruby Way" and didn't
> feel compelled to buy it because it lacked depth in many of the areas
> where I'd have wanted it the most (the GUI toolkits sections are
> particularly light, imho).

None of the Ruby books (including the Ruby Developer's Guide) have 
particularly "deep" sections on GUI development, because there's just 
not enough space. One could easily devote an entire book to a particular 
GUI toolkit, and the same is probably true for several other topics 
(e.g. database and web development with Ruby).

> My favorite Ruby book is the Pickaxe, especially since it's licensed under
> the OPL... even better that Dave and Andy made it available as HTML.
> Having that as a resource during my first week of Ruby programming
> (without having to buy it) was invaluable-- without it I wonder if I would
> have ever felt compelled to use Ruby when I was already quite happy with
> Perl... this also led me to buy the book fairly quickly thereafter.

My *two* favorite books (let's call it a tie) are "Programming Ruby" and 
"The Ruby Way", and I think they complement each other. You are 
absolutely correct that anyone new to Ruby should read "Programming 
Ruby" first; I think the first half of the book does an excellent job of 
introducing you to the language, and the second half has some nice 
hard-core stuff for later. In contrast, TRW is not meant for beginning 
Ruby programmers, nor is it a hard-core reference guide. TRW takes more 
of a cookbook-style approach and shows you various Ruby idioms and ways 
of doing things. I've learned a lot about Ruby programming by studying 
the little examples in TRW, even when the examples *themselves* weren't 
especially useful to me. The deceptively-titled "Simple Data Tasks" 
chapter is an especially good source for these.

> In fact, if other English-language Ruby books were licensed OPL and
> available on the net, I would buy hardcopy just to show my support-- even
> if they weren't as useful to me as the Pickaxe.

Why don't you go ahead and buy a hard (paperback) copy of "The Ruby Way" 
now? Then, if it's OPL'd later you can tell your friends how 
forward-thinking you were ;)