I've already got the pragmatic programmers guide, which is a great
book but a little light on specifics.  It would also be great if it
had a list of error messages as some of them can be quite cryptic.

For example, the following code:

a = 1;
class <<a
  def +@(b)  
    puts "test"
  end
end
puts(a.+(2))

yeilds this error

-:2: no virtual class for Fixnum (TypeError)

any ideas why?

On Thursday, 17 January 2002, at 06:47:23, Eirikur Hallgrimsson wrote:


> > What is the definitive ruby book?  The oreilly book or the pragmatic
> > programmers book?
> 
> The O'Reilly "Ruby in a Nutshell" book is a typical O'Reilly nutshell guide.
> It's very terse and doesn't provide much, if any, example code.
> 
> I seem to enjoy the Pragmatic book more than "The Ruby Way," but I think 
> that's a personal thing.   If you can get to a store that has them, I'd get 
> all the Ruby books and sit down for a while with them and buy the ones that 
> seem to work for you.  For example, "The Ruby Way" has an excellent 
> introduction to Ruby even though it's not an introductory book.
> 
> Personally, I could have saved the money and just gotten the Pragmatic 
> "Programming Ruby" book, but I ordered "The Ruby Way" and the Nutshell guide, 
> unseen.  I do look things up in the Nutshell guide.  It's handy and thin, 
> easy to work with.    "The Ruby Way" is a great source of examples of how to 
> accomplish typical DP tasks in Ruby, and it would probably be essential if 
> you were coding a large system that needed to accomplish a variety of things.
> 
> Eirikur
> 
>