From: Nathaniel Talbott <nathaniel@...>
Date: 2004-03-23T22:41:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Need some advice on PickAxe II

On Mar 23, 2004, at 05:57, Chad Fowler wrote:

> On Mar 22, 2004, at 12:46 PM, Dave Thomas wrote:
>
>> Folks:
>>
>>
>> In Ruby 1.8, the library has grown astonishingly: I count almost 100 
>> library modules and classes in lib/ alone. If we were to document 
>> these in any kind of detail, the book would grow to 2000 pages, and 
>> we wouldn't be done until 2008 :)
>>
>
> Personally, I never pull out the pickaxe as a reference.  I think its 
> real strength (and you and Andy's core strength as a unit) is to help 
> people understand the high level concepts that are important when 
> learning a dynamic language like Ruby.  To me, the biggest bang for 
> the buck would be for you to stay at that level, and leave API 
> documentation to the ruby-doc folks (which could, in this open source 
> community, theoretically be any/all of us).

I guess I'm just the opposite... the number one thing I've used my 
Pickaxe for is an API reference. I like having a dead tree form I can 
thumb through looking for what I want, and the Pickaxe goes everywhere 
with me in my backpack. The second most useful part to me has been the 
language reference - when learning Ruby it seemed like I found 
something new and cool about the syntax in there every other day. I 
personally picked up the high level concepts of a dynamic language 
mostly elsewhere, both before and after discovering Ruby. Different 
strokes for different folks, I guess.

Anyhow, I like the general direction Dave's pointing out for this 
edition, because there's a lot of good stuff in the standard library 
that folks don't even know about, but it would be overkill to 
comprehensively document all of it in the same book. OTOH, I'd love it 
if some of the most useful, general purpose libraries had good, 
comprehensive API documentation in the style of the original Pickaxe. 
Things like WEBrick, Test::Unit, DRb, optparse, etc., that mailing list 
traffic show are being used on a regular basis.

Oh, and mostly unrelated: I hope this edition uses under_score notation 
instead of camelCase. I know I was led astray by the Pickaxe in my 
early days of Ruby programming :-/


> Excellent (almost) news on the future of Pick Axe!

My current one is looking really abused... it's about time to get a new 
one to beat up in my backpack :-)


Nathaniel
Terralien, Inc.

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