Hi everyone,
I am pleased to announce that I have translated in English the second
chapter (“Objects”) of the “Ruby Hacking Guide” by Minero AOKI. The
Japanese name of the book is “Ruby kanzen soosu coodo kaisetsu” (that
means “Ruby complete source code explanation”), but “Ruby Hacking
Guide” was its working title and has more or less become its
“official” English name.
This book explains the internals of the ruby interpreter. And even if
you do not care about how the interpreter works, I think it can help
have a better understanding of Ruby and how to make extension
libraries. To fully understand the content, you’ll need to have a good
knowledge of Ruby and C. And do not forget that Ruby is the language
and ruby its implementation.
Why the second chapter? Well, because I think it was the first chapter
that we needed to have a translation of. The first chapter of the book
is just a summary of the Ruby language. In English we already have the
Pickaxe with its first edition freely available on the Web. And as
translating takes a lot of time, I think it’s better to select the
most interesting ones. The chapter 4 and 6 are on the tracks.
Be aware of the fact that I am far from being a professional
translator, this translation was just a way for me to improve my
knowledge of Ruby and the Japanese language. And English is not my
mother tongue, so it takes a little longer for me to translate. But I
think more people are interested in an English version ;). The English
could be better but I prefer spending more time on the Japanese and
let someone better than me correct my sentences.
I would like to also use this mail to ask if anyone else is interested
in translating the RHG in English. Minero AOKI told me he thinks that
some other people may have begun translating on their side, and I
think he may be right. So if you have started translating it or want
to, do not hesitate to manifest yourself. Japanese people are of
course welcome to join us. You do not even need to know Japanese to
help: you can maybe check wording, grammar and spelling, or help us
with the diagrams.
I doubt that alone I would able to translate the whole book (it’s 500
pages long), but with some help, we should be able to at least
translate a big part of it.
Finally, I’d like to thank Minero AOKI for allowing me to post my
translation of his book on the web. Thanks also to Laurent SANSONETTI
for checking my translation, to Kouhei SUTOU for helping me understand
some Japanese sentences, and to the Rubyforge guys for hosting us.
Here’s the address: http://rhg.rubyforge.org
And for those who want the Japanese version, it’s still available at
『Rubyソースコード完全解説』サポートページ (Rubyソースコード完全解説 if
you want to directly access the content).
Cheers,
Vincent “scritch” ISAMBART
