RubyInstaller Extras

Ruby
1

Since 2009, we’ve been pleased to include Huw C.'s The Book
of Ruby with RubyInstaller. Well now, Huw has a newly updated version,
and he’s published it with No Starch Press.

In celebration of Huw’s newly released The Book of Ruby, we’re offering
you Chapter 10: “Blocks, Procs, and Lambdas” absolutely free!

But wait, there’s more. Our friends at No Starch Press are offering a
30% discount when you buy the book at nostarch.com. Simply use the
discount code RUNREADRUBY to get 30% off. And, if you buy the print
book, you’ll get the ebook bundle (PDF, ePub, and Mobi) for free!

Simply click on the link below to Chapter 10 to start reading and to
take advantage of this great offer!

http://www.nostarch.com/download/boruby_rubyinstaller_promo.pdf

Don’t worry if you lose this email announcement as we’ll keep the link
to Chapter 10 on our homepage http://rubyinstaller.org/ for a little
while.

Enjoy the latest RubyInstaller and DevKit releases, download the free
“Blocks, Procs, and Lambdas” PDF, and check out Huw’s new release of The
Book of Ruby at Book of Ruby | No Starch Press

And don’t forget your 30% discount code RUNREADRUBY.

Jon

blog: http://jonforums.github.com/
twitter: @jonforums

“Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks
imagination.” - Mark Twain

2

…looks interesting…i’m just finishing up on a long Haskell
journey…so,
i’ll probably buy this book…but the 30% discount is not a large
incentive,
since Amazon is selling it for $26.37 - so, i’ll buy it there…

----- Original Message -----
From: “Jon” [email protected]
To: “ruby-talk ML” [email protected];
[email protected]
Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2011 4:52 PM
Subject: [ANN] RubyInstaller Extras

3

I’ve actually read the book (admittedly skimmed in parts), and it’s a
fine book, with one exception: The author uses a very non-standard
coding style. You can see it in the example chapter.

So, good for learning, except no Ruby code you ever read will look like
that.

4

On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 10:33:44PM +0900, patrick lynch wrote:

…looks interesting…i’m just finishing up on a long Haskell
journey…so, i’ll probably buy this book…but the 30% discount is not a
large incentive, since Amazon is selling it for $26.37 - so, i’ll buy it
there…

I thought it might be worth it to get from No Starch Press with the 30%
discount anyway, because the price with the discount code is only about
a
buck and a half more than the Amazon price and it comes with ebook
formats for no additional charge that way (whereas Amazon doesn’t appear
to offer an ebook format for it at all, including Kindle – and if it
did, it would probably be at least $20 for that one format).

I was thinking of getting it from No Starch Press because of the free
ebook formats, but when I saw Steve K.'s email commenting on the
abnormal code style in the book I decided I should really read a sample
chapter or two (in addition to the sample Chapter 10 being offered here,
the No Starch Press site also offers Chapter 11).

That adventure led to a combined review of two books, The Book of Ruby
and Eloquent Ruby. If you’re interested:

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

The TL;DR summary goes something like this:

I'd recommend *Eloquent Ruby* over *The Book of Ruby*, not only
because I think it is better, but also because it very well might
make *The Book of Ruby* largely redundant.
5

On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 1:07 PM, Chad P. [email protected] wrote:

to offer an ebook format for it at all, including Kindle – and if it

Enjoyed the review. Your summary of Eloquent Ruby reflected my
experience
pretty accurately.

6

On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 8:07 PM, Chad P. [email protected] wrote:

The TL;DR summary goes something like this:

I’d recommend Eloquent Ruby over The Book of Ruby, not only
because I think it is better, but also because it very well might
make The Book of Ruby largely redundant.

I’d like to add to your review that Eloquent Ruby actually explains
why Rubyists use the style they use (minimalism and pragmatism
figure big).

–
Phillip G.

twitter.com/phgaw
phgaw.posterous.com

A method of solution is perfect if we can forsee from the start,
and even prove, that following that method we shall attain our aim.
– Leibniz

7

Steve K. wrote in post #1010473:

I’ve actually read the book (admittedly skimmed in parts), and it’s a
fine book, with one exception: The author uses a very non-standard
coding style. You can see it in the example chapter.

So, good for learning, except no Ruby code you ever read will look like
that.

Interesting note Steve, perhaps is because author’s background is
dotNET?
(he is one of Ruby in Steel editor which uses Visual Studio).

–
Luis L.

8

This got more replies than I expected and it’s good to see discussion on
the content.

The main goal of the RubyInstaller is to provide a solid, foundational
Ruby environment for Windows that’s upgradeable, minimally invasive,
easy to use, easy to maintain, and helps newcomers quickly get up and
running and enjoying our Ruby.

This goal drives almost all we do, from our installers and archives to
our online and embedded documentation. Huw’s earlier version met that
goal quite well. It’s also the reason why I worked with No Starch and
selected the Blocks, Procs, and Lambdas chapter from Huw’s new version.

The great thing is you now have access to Huw’s earlier version and two
chapters from his new version in order to decide whether his book
resonates with you. For those with suggestions and improvements I
encourage you to provide that feedback directly to Huw so it doesn’t
simply remain trapped on this thread.

Finally, I’m always on the lookout for new partnering opportunities that
both (a) make sense for the RubyInstaller project, and (b) truly add
value. Keep an eye out for future RubyInstaller Extras announcements.

If you got a cool new partnering idea, we’d love to hear from you. Drop
me and Luis a private email and let’s see if it makes sense.

Jon

blog: http://jonforums.github.com/
twitter: @jonforums

“Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks
imagination.” - Mark Twain

9

In general, No Starch is an awesome publisher, and I’ve really liked
every other book I have by them. It just seems to be something with
this particular author’s style. He’s posted something about it, with
the full part of the book where he talks about it:
http://www.bitwisemag.com/2/Programming-With-Style

10

On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 9:26 AM, Jon F. [email protected]
wrote:

goal quite well. It’s also the reason why I worked with No Starch and
value. Keep an eye out for future RubyInstaller Extras announcements.
“Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks
imagination.” - Mark Twain

–
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

FWIW, I my experience buying Land of Lisp ebook directly from No Starch
was
positive, they offered it in several main formats, including PDF (Amazon
only offers Kindle’s format). In fact, it was positive enough that I had
decided to stop buying books from Amazon (b/c they don’t support any
format
I want). Which is what led to my jaw droppingly negative experience with
Addison Wesley’s parent company’s ebook distributor, where I ended up
threatening to report them to the BBB.

Eloquent Ruby might be a better book, but I can’t really see how I can
ever
buy another book from them, but I’d happily buy another book from No
Starch
Press.

That said, I was a little shocked that Land of Lisp didn’t have syntax
highlighting, I mean it’s a PDF, capitalize on its strengths, already!
PragProg’s PDFs have syntax highlighting (though not it’s pretty
simplistic).

11

On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 12:28:56AM +0900, Josh C. wrote:

FWIW, I my experience buying Land of Lisp ebook directly from No Starch was
positive, they offered it in several main formats, including PDF (Amazon
only offers Kindle’s format). In fact, it was positive enough that I had
decided to stop buying books from Amazon (b/c they don’t support any format
I want). Which is what led to my jaw droppingly negative experience with
Addison Wesley’s parent company’s ebook distributor, where I ended up
threatening to report them to the BBB.

What kind of problem did you have? I’m interested in hearing about your
experience.

Eloquent Ruby might be a better book, but I can’t really see how I can ever
buy another book from them, but I’d happily buy another book from No Starch
Press.

For what it’s worth, I got Eloquent Ruby as an ebook for my Nook from
Barnes & Noble, and I’ve had no problems whatsoever. I will not try to
speak for other ebook formats than the EPUB version I got, or for other
ebook vendors that may carry this book.

That said, I was a little shocked that Land of Lisp didn’t have syntax
highlighting, I mean it’s a PDF, capitalize on its strengths, already!
PragProg’s PDFs have syntax highlighting (though not it’s pretty
simplistic).

I don’t find that very surprising at all. We still have not progressed
to the point where most publishers would consider ebooks anything better
than a second-class citizen. As such, the books are designed for print
format, and the ebooks are generally produced from minimally finessed
variations on the print format. Because print books generally do not
come with syntax highlighting (in large part because of a desire to
minimize printing costs), ebooks generally will not come with syntax
highlighting either (in large part because of a desire to minimize
changes in the publishing process despite supporting a completely
different publication format).

By the way, there are ebook formats that do not support color, too.
That
means that in some cases the simple fact of desiring to minimize costs
while supporting multiple formats can result in skipping syntax
highlighting, too. The fact of the matter is that the Pragmatic
Programmers imprint is (unsurprisingly) way ahead of the curve in some
respects.

12

re: style and idiom, one of the areas that rarely gets attention is the
importance of being able to quickly read code for understanding while
not getting distracted by different styles. Too often I see smart dev’s
wasting tremendous amounts of time arguing over why they hate how
MyCoolMethod ( 0 ); or if (NULL == ptr) looks rather than figuring
out how it works.

This is important in today’s reality as many of us develop in multiple
languages and integrate together code from multiple disparate sources.
The dynamic and type inferrencing capabilities of languages such as
groovy, scala, c#, etc make this even more relevant.

Consider the following C samples:

/* libyaml’s parser.c */
YAML_DECLARE(int)
yaml_parser_parse(yaml_parser_t *parser, yaml_event_t event)
{
assert(parser); / Non-NULL parser object is expected. /
assert(event); / Non-NULL event object is expected. */
…

/* libgit2’s oid.c */
GIT_INLINE(char) *fmt_one(char *str, unsigned int val)
{
…

/* libxml2’s xmllint.c */
static void
xmlHTMLPrintFileContext(xmlParserInputPtr input) {
…
while ((n++ < 80) && (cur > base) && (*cur != ‘\n’) && (*cur !=
‘\r’))
cur–;

These days there’s value in keeping your mental lexer/parser loose so as
to snarf through as much “others” code without setting off your code
style hate.

Jon