Re: My Thought on the "Pickaxe book" (from a Ruby novice)

Ruby
1

But there’re not THAT many ways to do something even in Ruby, so you
pretty quickly pickup most of them. Moreover, for me learnig about every
new way of doing things was quite educational and I enjoyed greatly when
realizing that something that took me 20 lines of code before, now takes
5 if not 1 (in some cases). This is what I found true about Ruby:

Another (better) way => less code => less bugs => more fun

Gennady.

2

On Jan 19, 2006, at 8:07, Gennady B. wrote:

But there’re not THAT many ways to do something even in Ruby,

Have you been paying any attention to this maillist? Oh, my gosh. The
recent thread about counting unique elements in an array generated an
armload of possibilities, all different, for example. Some people will
do Regex magic, others use .inject or some tricky form of .each. One
person uses symbolic hashes, another adds a new method to the class.

I must agree; the Pickaxe book is a great reference but a lousy
tutorial. I don’t want to learn the nine ways to iterate. I want to
learn one, so I can move on to other ideas. If I spend a lot of time
iterating, THEN I’ll go read the later chapter on iterating and find
the shorter, quicker, less-typing way of doing it. But if I get them
all at once, I can’t even figure out which one to use until I’ve
figured them all out, and to then discover that they’re all the same
dang thing is just exasperating.

I don’t need && and “and” because i already know how to use
parentheses, for example. The key lessons and important concepts are
lost in the noise of learning nine ways to do the same thing.

Well, I’m sure somebody’s going to write the “Learn Ruby in 14 days”
book or the “Ruby for Dummies” book or something else, and the Pickaxe
book can just be The Reference Book.

3

Hi –

On Fri, 20 Jan 2006, Dave H. wrote:

Well, I’m sure somebody’s going to write the “Learn Ruby in 14 days” book or
the “Ruby for Dummies” book or something else, and the Pickaxe book can just
be The Reference Book.

You could always chop 33% out of the 21 days book :slight_smile:

The Pickaxe is the Pickaxe. Everyone gets something from it, and
probably different things, including (at least in my case) a ton of
tutorial benefit. No need to pigeonhole it. If it walks like a
tutorial and talks like a tutorial… :slight_smile:

David

–
David A. Black
[email protected]

“Ruby for Rails”, from Manning Publications, coming April 2006!

4

On Jan 19, 2006, at 6:22 PM, Dave H. wrote:

Have you been paying any attention to this maillist? Oh, my gosh.
The recent thread about counting unique elements in an array
generated an armload of possibilities, all different, for example.
Some people will do Regex magic, others use .inject or some tricky
form of .each. One person uses symbolic hashes, another adds a new
method to the class.

Is it any surprise that there are an almost infinite
number of ways to construct an algorithm to count unique
elements? I just don’t see how that observation says anything
at all about Ruby as opposed to something about the theory of
algorithms.

Or more simply, wouldn’t you have the same response if the
solutions were required to be in any other language you might choose?

If I were forced to point out a redundant language feature of Ruby
I would point to for/in versus each.

Gary W.