From: oinkoink+unet@... (Bret Jolly)
Date: 2004-03-30T03:49:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Need some advice on PickAxe II

I loved the first Pickaxe, and I agree that with ri available,
Pickaxe II need not try to document everything.  There were
two holes in the first Pickaxe that I think should be filled.
The first is that the insane gotchas that occur when you try
to do math without including mathn were not mentioned.  Indeed,
I don't think the mathn library was mentioned.  Hopefully these
bugs will be fixed in Ruby by then, but if not, the book should
warn about them.

(BTW, does anybody know why these haven't been fixed?  They've
been known for ages, and since they are fixed by requiring mathn,
I don't understand why mathn isn't required automatically when
rational, complex, or matrix are.)

The second was that dealing with international character encodings
was mentioned only perfunctorily.  A few examples would have been
very helpful for those of us who live in the wider, non-ASCII world.

The great thing about the Pickaxe is it really teaches you how
to think with Ruby.  I had never dealt with such a dynamic, OO
language before (the closest approach having been Python), and
this book opened up a new world of programming for me.

Regards, Bret
Bret Jolly (Jou Lii Bair)