On 5/13/07, Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale / gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > give http://www.brpreiss.com/books/opus8/ a look.
>
> Thanks for that pointer Martin.
>
> I've started reading it, and I have to say that I'm feeling the need
> for a salt shaker for liberal use.
>
> My first hint that this might not be the best approach for Ruby was
> the large number of versions for other languages.  I'm afraid that
> this looks like YAPB (yet another ported book).  It seems to treat
> Ruby as if it were C.

I'll admit, I haven't read the book - I looked at the table of
contents and it seemed like it had decent coverage. Shame about the
actual development. I'd be all for an effort to create a similar book
for ruby. What would be a nice approach is a tour of the fundamental
data structures, each one accompanied by an algorithm that it forms
the core of, and a full implementation in ruby. If this were aimed at
working programmers looking at going back and catching up on CS
fundamentals, the examples could be one level above the usual toys -
for instance:

stack -> infix arithmetic expression parser
queue -> bitmap floodfill
linked list -> trivial memory allocator and compactor
heap -> priority queue
etc.

martin