From Python to Ruby

Ruby
1

Hi everyone!

I’ve been studying Python for a month or two but I didn’t like it. I did
some interesting things with it, though: I added some form of currying,
pipelining and, eventually, code blocks.
The reaction of the Python community wasn’t very positive, to put it
mildly, and I was accused of trying to ruin Python. Finally, someone
told me to go to my OMG-RUBYCODEBLOCKS-FRIENDS and I understood what was
happening.
I would never have expected such a reaction, really.

I decided to follow the kindly-put invitation and here I am!
I’ve read a few articles about Ruby and hey… I like it pretty much.
It reminds me of Perl (which I learned before Python) but is much
cleaner. It is much more flexible than Python and you can even build
DSLs!

Python’s community hate DSLs, by the way.
Python is very high-level and yet, while using it, I began to miss many
of the C++ capabilities that let you bend its syntax and do incredible
things like those in the Boost libraries.
I think that dynamic languages can do much more without all that noise
(C++ templates are very hard to maintain). So, it’s a pity when a
language such as Python lacks many features just for the fear that they
are misused or abused.

Anyway, a friend of mine suggested that I pick up “The well-grounded
Rubyist” and then “Metaprogramming Ruby”.
What do you think of them?

2

On May 4, 2012, at 6:25 PM, Massimiliano Tomassoli wrote:

Anyway, a friend of mine suggested that I pick up “The well-grounded
Rubyist” and then “Metaprogramming Ruby”.
What do you think of them?

I heard only good of them.

If you already have programming experience, I can also recomment
“The Ruby P.ming Language”, which is a nice run through the
whole language. Its not much of a tutorial, but a good way to
learn the language as a whole.

3

On Sat, May 05, 2012 at 01:25:24AM +0900, Massimiliano Tomassoli wrote:

I think that dynamic languages can do much more without all that noise
(C++ templates are very hard to maintain). So, it’s a pity when a
language such as Python lacks many features just for the fear that they
are misused or abused.

Anyway, a friend of mine suggested that I pick up “The well-grounded
Rubyist” and then “Metaprogramming Ruby”.
What do you think of them?

I have not read The Well-Grounded Rubyist, so I can’t really comment on
it. I’ll comment on Metaprogramming Ruby along with others, with URIs
for articles where I’ve reviewed them (to varying levels of detail)
before this.

The following five books were very briefly reviewed here:

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-development/?p=3886

  • Everyday Scripting With Ruby is an excellent introduction to the
    language for people with an at least passing familiarity with
    programming.

  • Metaprogramming Ruby is a fantastic introduction to metaprogramming
    with Ruby, but you might want to have a more basic book about Ruby on
    hand before tackling this book. Unlike many books organized the way
    this book was organized (see Ruby Best Practices), this thing is
    eminently suitable to just picking it up and reading it straight
    through from beginning to end. It also stands up to re-reading and
    use
    as a reference when grasping for ideas on how to do something.

  • Programming Ruby is pretty comprehensive. It is a bit dry by the
    standards of most Ruby books, but pretty engaging by the standards of
    most other languages’ popular books, and the wealth of knowledge
    buried
    in it is invaluable. It is definitely not for people new to
    programming.

  • Ruby Best Practices is a great book for expanding your knowledge of
    Ruby some time after you’ve got a little bit of Ruby time under your
    belt, and it’s great for jumping around in it to read the parts that
    happen to interest you Right Now. It conveys some real sense of how
    real, talented Rubyists write code, as a means of imparting an
    appreciation for good Ruby code on the reader.

  • The Ruby Way is a cookbook that contains so many examples of how to
    accomplish basic tasks that one might be able to build a career as a
    professional Rubyist on just reproducing the snippets contained in it
    and tying them together into programs (maybe). The best thing about
    it, though, is the way it uses these recipes to illustrate idiomatic
    Ruby coding styles.

Five other books were also reviewed there, though I tried to pick out a
selection that I thought would be most relevant to the sense I have of
what you want/need based on what you’ve said here.

The following two books were reviewed here:

  http://blogstrapping.com/?page=2011.194.11.46.40

  • Eloquent Ruby is a great book for both people new to Ruby with at
    least
    a passing familiarity with programming and for people who have been
    writing code in Ruby for a while and want to make sure they haven’t
    missed anything important.

  • The Book of Ruby is a terrible book that tries to teach the reader bad
    habits, includes code formatted in such a way that it is fairly
    difficult to read, and explains things in a kind of haphazard manner
    prone to digressions on irrelevancy and generally fails to do a very
    good job of teaching people how to program well in Ruby.

I hope that helps.

4

I decided to read “The Ruby P.ming Language”. Thank you both.