Hi --

On Sun, 1 Dec 2002, Daniel Carrera wrote:

> > I feel a little frustrated with Ruby's documentation. I like the
> > companion book "The Pragmatic Programmer". However, it is apparently not
> > good enough to be a online manual. May be because I'm completely new to
> > Ruby.
>
> I am completely new to Ruby, and I echo your frustration.  There should be
> a book intended to introduce Ruby to newbies.

Have you looked at "Teach Yourself Ruby in 21 Days" (from Sams)?

> I'd also like to see a book for people who don't know OO. I've programmed
> for several years, but I don't know OO.  Ruby is my first OO language.  I
> find that the current book jumps into classes before it's covered the
> basics like flow-control, functions and variables.  I still figured it
> out, but it was harder than it could have been.  It also starts on
> iterators before explaining more basic syntas.  The 'Class#method' syntax
> and a couple other things are not explained either.
>
> There could be a chapter or two for people who simply have never
> programmed before.  There's nothing wrong with starting classes sooner
> than you would in another language, but it still should come after more
> basic things.

To go from never having programmed, to a full understanding of
everything in the Pickaxe book, would require more than you could get
from a couple of introductory chapters added to the book.  However...
the idea of having first-time programmer books that use Ruby is a good
one.  I believe there's at least one such book among the 23 Japanese
books on Ruby, and I know there's been discussion of doing such a
thing in English (as well as related things, like a book along those
lines specifically targeted at children), but I'm not sure who's
working on what right now.


David

-- 
David Alan Black
home: dblack / candle.superlink.net
work: blackdav / shu.edu
Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav