On Wed, Dec 28, 2005 at 08:57:30AM +0900, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Tuesday 27 December 2005 06:17 pm, Dan Shafer wrote:
> > FWIW, I'm a newby to Ruby but I've worked with several other Web
> > frameworks (Zope, Plone, etc.) and have written and published a few
> > computer books of my own. This title is one of the best-written and
> > clearest treatments of this kind of topic I've ever read. Thomas has
> > a real knack for making stuff clear and understandable. Highly
> > recommended.
> 
> With a recommendation like that I have only one option -- I ordered both the 
> pdf and the book. I'll let you all know what I think in about a week.
> 

I'll add to that:

I have the hardcopy.  I haven't navigated through the whole thing yet,
but it is indeed one of the clearest, most useful books of its type I've
ever had the distinct pleasure to run across.  In addition, Appendix A
the single most concise language tutorial I've ever seen that is
actually useful, and makes an excellent introduction to the language for
a mediocre Perl hack like myself.  You, being rather more the Perl
expert than I am, may or may not find it as useful.  I'd like to know
what you think.

As for Rails itself: it's dead simple to use.  I've always, in the past,
been disappointed by the fact that web frameworks -- supposedly designed
to make web development easier -- always seemed to make the overall
process of developing a serious web app more complex and tedious rather
than less (which is why I ended up using PHP for anything on the
incredibly simple end of the spectrum despite my general distaste for
the language).  Rails breaks that trend rather handily, for my purposes.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]

unix virus: If you're using a unixlike OS, please forward
this to 20 others and erase your system partition.