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| Book: | Programming Ruby | |
| Subject: | Brutal reading. you will learn if you do the work. | |
| Date: | 2007-08-29 23:14:07 | |
| From: | RubyFreak | |
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Rating:
I was reading Dave Thomas' "Agile Web Development with Rails" and decided that I need to read the Pickaxe book in order to understand the first one.(it is called the Pickaxe book because of the pick-axe on the cover) All tech authors, instructors etc, have to make a choice: Cater to the slowest meathead in the class or cater to the sharpest tack. I guess I fit the meathead definition as the Pickaxe kicked my butt(so did Dave's other book). Don't get me wrong, the Pickaxe was a good book for me, in fact if you are a pretty well versed "curly Brace" programmer in PHP or Java or C it would is a great book for you. Lets face it, Dave Thomas is the "take no prisoners", Chuck Norris of Ruby. Ruby would not exist in it's current form without him (Thanks Dave). I am a veteran Visual Basic guy (AKA not a real programmer) and a lot of what was in the Pickaxe was new to me. For a newbie like myself, it was a huge amount of work. The problem is that I did not have the assumed background knowledge to understand most of the examples. Dave would be describing one point of the Ruby language and give a code example that interjected as many as 3 other, heretofore unexplained functions or Ruby calls. I suppose that many people would not have had to look them up, I did. Things like Grep and gsub and many regExp options plus just a lot of fancy Ruby calls. I Did learn a HUGE amount looking these things up, and it was worth it to me. The actual book I needed would have twice or three times as thick and an experienced curly brace programmer would have hated it. So, This is a great book and you should buy it as there is not a better book out there, but, if you are a newbie, be ready to work. It took me about 50 hours to read and FULLY understand the first 173 pages. Yup, Like 15 to 20 minutes per page. (you are thinking this guy is a fricking moron, read the book first and then decide) I put alphabetical markers in the index and I recommend that you do that first thing, as YOU WILL BE IN THE INDEX all the time and you will be looking up stuff on the internet when it isn't in the index. Part of me would like to give the book a rating of less than 5, but "Definitive" does describe this book. It IS the definitive guide to Ruby. |
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