From: Matt Lawrence <matt@...>
Date: 2004-03-24T03:41:51+09:00
Subject: Re: Need some advice on PickAxe II

On Wed, 24 Mar 2004, Phil Tomson wrote:

> >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.

Youngsters these days....  In my day, I carried multiple boxes of punch 
cards in my backpack.  Not to mention loading operating systems from paper 
tape -- at 10 cps!
 
> >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.

Trying to find out what libraries exist and how to use them is a real 
problem, not just in Ruby.  While my assembly language programming skills 
are probably better than most of the folks on this list, my Ruby 
programming skills are much weaker than the average person on this list.  
And, having met the authors of some of the books, I would have to say that 
they are so much more skillful that I think they sometimes have trouble 
talking down to my level.  All in all, I think Ruby has some issues with 
not being easily accessable to the non-wizard types.

I use the reference in the back of the Pickaxe book A LOT.  I'd love to 
see all of the included libraries documented in a similar format and 
made available in a form that I could print out and have spiral bound.

> 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.

Well, while I'd like to see a 1.8 version of the book, I think it might be 
better to wait for Ruby 2.0.

-- Matt
Attitude:  The difference between ordeal and adventure