For expats from other languages, what’s the next best step after the
Agile Web Dev book:
Rails Recipes or Ruby for Rails?
Thanks,
Austin
On 7/20/06, Austin G. [email protected] wrote:
For expats from other languages, what’s the next best step after the
Agile Web Dev book:Rails Recipes or Ruby for Rails?
I’ve read all three and if I had it to again I’d prefer to read them
in this order:
Ruby for Rails
Agile Web Dev
Rails Recipes
Ruby for Rails is for Ruby beginners as much as it’s for Rails in
general.
Rails Recipes becomes very useful once you’re into Rails a bit.
Greg D. wrote:
Ruby for Rails
Agile Web Dev
Rails RecipesRuby for Rails is for Ruby beginners as much as it’s for Rails in general.
Rails Recipes becomes very useful once you’re into Rails a bit.
The Recipes book have been EXTREMELY valuable to me. Easily worth the
investment many times over.
–
Ola B. (http://ola-bini.blogspot.com)
JvYAML, RbYAML, JRuby and Jatha contributor
System Developer, Karolinska Institutet (http://www.ki.se)
OLogix Consulting (http://www.ologix.com)
“Yields falsehood when quined” yields falsehood when quined.
My next step was Ruby for Rails and I’ve highly enjoyed it. In fact,
I stopped midway through Agile to move to Ruby for Rails because I
wanted a more thorough introduction to the language itself before
jumping too far into rails. But I’ve enjoyed both books and just
received my Recipes book in the mail on Monday of this week. I am
looking forward to using some of the recipes contained within.
Hope that helps.
-geoffrey
Recipes is a very good resource book. I would go for the Ruby for Rails
before Recipes.
Hi Austin,
If you’re a hardened veteran and you’ve already read the Agile Dev book,
you
might consider Programming Ruby. The reference material is all there,
and
you can find it pretty easily. Much easier to use and read out of order
than
Ruby for Rails, in my opinion.
If you’re new to Ruby, get Ruby for Rails, if you’re good with Ruby,
Rails Recipes. They’re both good but you’ll get a lot more out of
Rails if you understand Ruby.
I actually didn’t get that much out of the Pickaxe book, it was way
too beginner-oriented and I got impatient with it. Likewise the
Poignant Guide to Ruby, the cartoon foxes are cool but I got impatient
with that as well. If you’re a competent, seasoned programmer, but new
to Ruby the language, I would actually recommend “The Ruby Way” by Hal
Fulton before any books on Rails or any other books on Ruby. That book
basically assumes that you know how to do stuff but you don’t know how
to do stuff in Ruby. It even has an appendix “Coming to Ruby from
Perl” and another “Coming to Ruby from Python” which when taken
together were a huge timesaver for me personally. It is in fact a
pretty kickass book.
Fulton before any books on Rails or any other books on Ruby. That book
basically assumes that you know how to do stuff but you don’t know how
to do stuff in Ruby. It even has an appendix “Coming to Ruby from
Perl” and another “Coming to Ruby from Python” which when taken
together were a huge timesaver for me personally.
you know of any Smalltalk for Rubyist books? this Croquet thing has me
intrigued…and how integrated the development tools with the rest of
the environment… i want to make a way to expose parts of the world via
Seaside…but need to bone up on Smalltalk first…
cheers
any books for ‘coming to lisp from python/perl/ruby’ would be interested
in too…
+1 for Programming Ruby.
Hooray for random tangents!
All the Smalltalk books I have are free downloads. To be honest my
Smalltalk skills are basically nil, I have Cincom VisualWorks
Smalltalk and I’m not thrilled with it at all. I need a better
SmallTalk to work in.
The best books on Lisp I’m aware of are the purple wizard book from
MIT and Paul Graham’s books. You can also find a series of videos
recorded at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto in the 80s by the purple
wizard guys which are available free online and really funny for all
the 80s fashion and old-school computer displays.
http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/
Fair warning, it’s a good 20 hours of video.
James Edward G. of the Ruby quiz did a pretty kickass series of blog
articles on Lisp-style programming in Ruby. He was reading a book
called “Higher-Order Perl,” about Lisp-style programming in Perl, and
did some translations into Ruby, along with pretty interesting
commentary/ideas/etc.
I’m getting weird http errors but the link is:
http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/category/higher-order-ruby
Supposedly Amy Hoy’s book is going to help fill part of this gap. Not
open
yet. In the mean time, Recipies.
On Thursday 20 July 2006 23:42, carmen wrote:
any books for ‘coming to lisp from python/perl/ruby’ would be
interested in too…
Try Peter Seibel’s Practical Common Lisp
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/
Michael
–
Michael S.
mailto:[email protected]
http://www.schuerig.de/michael/
Hi,
I think Pickaxe was a good choice after Agile for me.
Peter
On 7/20/06, Peter M. [email protected] wrote:
Hi,
I think Pickaxe was a good choice after Agile for me.
I’ll risk sounding a heretic here 
To this day I’ve not been able to read Pickaxe, whereas I found Ruby For
Rails very helpful, as was Why’s Poignant Guide. I believe it is a
learning
style thing. Black’s book uses more narrative to explain concepts, piece
by
piece, while the Thomas book, I feel, tends to let lots of little code
examples speak for themselves. Not that this is a bad thing, mind you,
just
a “different strokes for different folks” kind of thing.
carmen wrote:
Fulton before any books on Rails or any other books on Ruby. That book
basically assumes that you know how to do stuff but you don’t know how
to do stuff in Ruby. It even has an appendix “Coming to Ruby from
Perl” and another “Coming to Ruby from Python” which when taken
together were a huge timesaver for me personally.you know of any Smalltalk for Rubyist books? this Croquet thing has me
My favourite Smalltalk book is Kent Beck’s “Smalltalk Best Practice
Patterns” alongside an article (
http://www.eli.sdsu.edu/courses/spring01/cs635/readingSmalltalk.pdf ) by
Wilf LaLonde that introduces basic syntax. Disclaimer: I am
namechecked in that article because I wrote to Wilf demanding he write
it :
The article is only really required reading if Smalltalk sysntax is
entirely alien to you. I needed it to figure out what SBPP was teaching
me.
Alan
Having the Recipes arrive a few at a time was fun.
I’ve read all these, and I think there has been enough advice on the
suggested order of reading. I just wanted to say how much I really
appreciate the Rails Recipes book lately. I always get the PDF+Book
option,
and I’ll print out a recipe or two and just bring them to the beach or
wherever - mark them up, fold them, etc. I’ve been dragging the book
around
a lot too, and reading the recipes is really strengthening one of my big
Rails weaknesses… learning how to first attack a problem. I can extend
easily, and given enough time I can build… but I’m still grokking the
whole system & process and the Recipes book is lowering my personal
thrash
time. Hope that makes sense.
I’ve been very impressed with the quality of the Pragmatic Programmers
books, and the Manning Publications books. I recommend them to anyone
who
will listen. 
+1 for Pickaxe (retrospectively) - learning Ruby makes Rails fun
Though to be honest, truly honest, it was fun getting each new
installment/draft of the Rails Recipes as they came out and looking at
the new recipies.
On Thu, Jul 20, 2006 at 02:16:58PM -0700, Zack C. wrote:
+1 for Programming Ruby.
Likewise, I can’t say enough good things about the Pickaxe book.
One of my all time favorite books, and I would call it essential
if you are doing anything serious with Ruby.
I’ve jumped around the last few weeks. First starting the AWDWR
tutorial a few times, continuing on into the framework section and
then adjuncting with Ruby for Rails. However the last week I’ve made
it a priority to read R4R front to back and in between. I’ve also
read the big section (whichever one that is) of the Pickaxe. The
section that really goes into the language. All of these books are
different in many ways from the writing style to the progression and
distillation of information. At this point I’m finding R4R more
digestable then AWDWR.
For my own learning I still recommend authors moving away from the
“application / tutorial” way of teaching to more exercise driven
chapters. Chris P.'s book LTP is for newbs to Ruby and programming
but each chapter end with a few exercises to challenge and grow your
programming confidence.
Hi –
On Fri, 21 Jul 2006, Tom T. wrote:
On Thu, Jul 20, 2006 at 02:16:58PM -0700, Zack C. wrote:
+1 for Programming Ruby.
Likewise, I can’t say enough good things about the Pickaxe book.
One of my all time favorite books, and I would call it essential
if you are doing anything serious with Ruby.
Definitely. I discovered Ruby through it, and consider it the classic
Ruby compendium and reference work.
In fact, I admire it so much that when I undertook to write a Ruby
book of my own, I made damn sure to write one that didn’t try to
compete directly with it Happily for me, the “for Rails” approach
to Ruby was becoming topical and was in need of an expositor.
I hope you’ll all enjoy all the Ruby and Rails books out there, and
then some. Buy them, borrow them, please don’t steal them… and
learn what you need from each. (I know I’m not addressing the
original question of what order to read things in – but the consensus
arising from the thread, namely that it depends on what your needs and
interests are, seems to me to answer that question correctly.)
David
–
http://www.rubypowerandlight.com => Ruby/Rails training & consultancy
Ruby for Rails => RUBY FOR RAILS (reviewed on
Slashdot, 7/12/2006!)
http://dablog.rubypal.com => D[avid ]A[. ]B[lack’s][ Web]log
[email protected] => me