From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson) Date: 2004-03-24T03:24:31+09:00 Subject: Re: Need some advice on PickAxe II In article , Nathaniel Talbott wrote: >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. I'd just like to second Nathaniel's opinion. I also carry the Pickaxe in my backpack/briefcase and use it as a reference both at home and at work. > >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. Yeah, and it would make it difficult to carry in our backpacks. >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. I'd have to agree with the list you have here. Perhaps it would be interesting to analyze the questions that people have been asking on c.l.r/ruby-talk to figure out which libraries to cover in-depth. I for one would certainly like to see in-depth coverage of the ones you mention above, though I can't think of any others right now off the top of my head (and maybe that's a good thing) except for maybe REXML and syck/YAML. But then again, maybe some of these things are best covered by examples. > >> 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 :-) Yep, I don't think mine will last much more than another year. I hope the new one's out before my current one totally falls apart. Phil