From: Tim Hunter <cyclists@...>
Date: 2002-11-15T09:41:33+09:00
Subject: Re: What's your favorite Ruby book?

On Thu, 14 Nov 2002 22:25:20 +0900, Michael C. Libby wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> 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).

Well, I'm not interested in the GUI toolkits so those pages remain unread.
For me, Chapters 1 thru 5 were worth the price of the book.

> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 

Good man! I think it's important to keep in mind that if we want publishers to
publish books about Ruby then we need to be buying books about Ruby. I
think in general the folks at SAMS and Addison Wesley don't care about the
OPL as much as they care about the BUX. I want to encourage
Dave/Andy/Hal/Matz/Lyle, et. al. to keep on thinking about Ruby, write
down what they think, and then tell me what they figured out in a book
that I can keep next to my keyboard.


>  -michael
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux)
> 
> iD8DBQE906P44ClW9KMwqnMRAg2rAKCrvJMXjK0h3DTrrlJSQplTUQ/0QgCgqr1N
> 8uj/l9xQxB+RqbRXsEUUqL8=
> =+gUv
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----