A few words about ruby 1.9
Recently, I start messing up with Ruby 1.9 . I bought the most advertised book about Ruby 1.9 online, called “Programming Ruby 1.9 – The pragmatic programmers guide“, and I start digging a bit.
The book itself is well written in my humble opinion and absurdly well documented. But in no way this is a book for starters. This is a book for switchers, with an advanced background. Even the way the book is written is kinda backwards. That said, I did not regret buying it, although my programming experience is poor. It has excellent pointers, from what I’ve seen, it goes deep in the language idioms, deals with the latest Ruby version which is 1.9 and points out the important innovations it brings to Ruby’s 1.8 disregard. It has very good examples as already said, it’s probably the best reference you can get out there.
For starters like myself and many others, the suggested books are “why’s poignant guide to ruby” which deals is a free book under creative commons. I like to print my books, even in photocopies. For a more professional approach there’s a very good reading “Learn to Program” for 11.04 £ at amazon written by Chris Pine. Both of these books are really good written and do not require any previous experience.
There are a few positive things that stroke with ruby, compared to Objective-C. First, it’s straight forward. I was able to write small helpful programs in less than 6 hours of reading. Note that I’m a new-be programmer, although some concepts were pretty familiar such as loops, iterations, etc. Ruby’s approach is tremendously easier using methods like “each”.
Don’t forget to join the Ruby-Talk Mailing List, for help and announcements on latest Ruby gems updates, new features, new gems, etc. It’s a very good place, I found no trolls (so far), no bad language, the netiquette is followed by the vast majority of the list, so should you join, try being polite.
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I’m glad you like Ruby. It might be a good idea to focus on Ruby 1.8.x though. 1.9.x is development, and 2.x.x will be the stable one. So maybe start building a solid foundation on 1.8.x. and then just learn the differences. I also recommend against _why’s poignant guide. It’s great as a comic but not that good for learning the language. I remember I was very tired trying to read it.
Thanks for the comment Aggelos
. Your comments on the matter are always more than welcomed.
Yeap, I end it up leaving it alone, because as you said is really boring. On the 1.8.x vs 1.9 I don’t know, actually on the intro of 1.9 PickAxe it points out that newcomers should go 1.9 in order to avoid the procedure of learning something and then not using because it’s obsolete. On the other hand, many important libraries (gems) – unfortunately – do not have a 1.9 supported version which sucks big time.