[ruby-talk:8117] Re: Code examples in the pickaxe book [long]

In article <[e-mail]>, "Dave Thomas"
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> 
> A couple of people have mentioned here that they're having problems
> because they're typing in code from the book, and some of the code
> fragments aren't self contained.
> ...

Dave,

I am sometimes one of those people, particularly since I'm
not a professional programmer.

I've read through your examples and understand that these are only
fragments. Sometimes, though, I take a break and I'm not sure how far I
need to go back when I miss something, as my post and followup last night
mentioned. (I also don't like those 24 hours books - it's "cut and paste"
learning, which isn't learning at all).

As long as people don't mind helping on this list, I don't see a problem
at this time.

Maybe when the second edition comes out :-), an occasional caveat wouldn't
hurt, such as on page 24,

" Because this is such a common idiom, Ruby procides a convenient
shortcut: attr_reader creates these accessor methods for you"

The additional caveat might say: "Without forgetting the initialization method",
or somesuch.

I actually didn't try the code above to save some typing, and probably
would have figured it out there, but I was in a hurry (my follow-up post
explained what I tried before I wrote the group - it wasn't good enough
because I refered to the example above without trying it, again).

All in all, I like this book, it reminds me of "Thinking In Java" (I
don't have the authors name in front of me). Maybe his method of
code might help.

Sincerely,
John C.