From: Shannon Fang <xrfang@...>
Date: 2002-12-01T22:01:35+09:00
Subject: Re: Cipher book for ruby

Hi all,

My feeling toward C++, and ruby, and any other language is that when you
learn it more, it becomes more cryptic. Ruby is in deed very impressive,
powerful, and easy to read. If I write my own program in ruby, I may not
use anything like symbol in years, but when I try to read other's
program, I will see it, and then I will try painfully to find out what
does that mean, and miserablly failed.

In fact, after some suggestion here, I read chap 18 "the ruby
programming language" again, and found explanation of most cryptic
historic symbols borrowed from perl. But it is still hard to lookup in
an emergency. In the document it follows a printed format referring to
page 202, for example. But HTML help file don't have page at all. 

Hence, what I suggested is a proper index of every sytactic elements in
the help file. Bill suggested that the printed version already have that.
Why not the online version?

Regards,
Shannon

On Sun, 1 Dec 2002 12:09:16 +0900
dblack@candle.superlink.net wrote:

> Hi --
> 
> On Sun, 1 Dec 2002, Shannon Fang wrote:
> 
> > Hi all ruby gurus there,
> >
> > I suggest if some one can initiate a documentation project for ruby? I
> > would call it The Ruby Cipher Book, or Ruby Demystified. In this
> > document, all ruby symobs, prefixes suffixes are explained, with
> > reference to the chapter in the online manual...
> 
> I thought there was something like that around (a concordance to the
> online pickaxe) but I can't seem to pinpoint it (assuming it actually
> exists in the first place).  Anyway, you might also be interested in
> the rubydoc book project: <http://www.rubydoc.org/book>.  It's an
> ongoing, online, collaborative Ruby book.
> 
> If you do start a new documentation project, I'd encourage you not to
> use a name that makes it sound like Ruby is somehow mystifying or
> cryptic in the first place.  Ruby is actually unusually clear and
> transparent in its syntax.  Of course there are things whose meaning
> isn't clear until you learn them specifically -- but that's true in
> any programming language, and it would be misleading to give the
> impression that learning Ruby equates to demystifying it.
> 
> 
> David
> 
> -- 
> David Alan Black
> home: dblack@candle.superlink.net
> work: blackdav@shu.edu
> Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav