From: Ruby Baby <ruby@...>
Date: 2004-03-11T14:04:55+09:00
Subject: Re: Possibility of 2nd edition of _The Ruby Way_

I *loved* The Ruby Way book, and am excited for an update.

But man all these topics brought up here make me hungry to
learn about these features NOW.

How likely do you think it would be that perhaps the same
number of people that would buy The Ruby Way 2nd Edition
would cough up that same amount of money to help support a
GREAT well-done professional online Ruby Tutorial site if
there was one?  Something with a PayPal tip jar, that 
became a GREAT place to learn Ruby from scratch?

I remember learning SO much about PHP from these sites:
http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Programming/Languages/PHP/Tutorials/
... because there were so many "Follow me and do exactly 
this" tutorials.  Those really help in the beginning, no
matter what level you're at with other languages.

As I've been learning Ruby, so many times I'm pointed to a
page that looks like this:
http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/rdoc/1.9/
... and I say, "Oh.  [sigh....]".   Yes it's possible to
learn from those pages, slowly, but so much nicer to have
a well-written tutorial to get you started with some examples
so you can dig into API docs later once you understand the
context.

There are so many odd quirky unfinished ugly abandoned Ruby 
websites out there, it seems to mis-represent the enthusiasm
so many of us have for this beautiful language.

I wish there was a beautiful tutorial site that made Ruby
just irresistable to learn.