The Most Unusual (and Best) Computer Language Book I've Ever Seen.
poignantguide.net
The Most Unusual (and Best) Computer Language Book I've Ever Seen.
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Re: The Most Unusual (and Best) Computer Language Book I've Ever Seen.
#2This is my recommended book for every programmer who wants to start learning ruby. One of the why's product.
Re: The Most Unusual (and Best) Computer Language Book I've Ever Seen.
#3I love the poignant guide! It (along with Ruby being an awesome language) got me into Ruby.
It's great because you read it because you enjoy it, and then you happen to learn Ruby in the process.
It also has some interesting analogies, examples, and ways to remember things. When talking about how block variables go inside |pipes|, he says:
I like to think of the pipe characters as representing a tunnel. They give the appearance of a chute that the variables are sliding down.
Much better at helping you remember the syntax than "block variables go in a comma-separated list which is enclosed by pipes" like you'd find in a normal book.
Re: The Most Unusual (and Best) Computer Language Book I've Ever Seen.
#4Unusual? Certainly. Best? Not for me.
I had some time this past summer and decided that I wanted to experiment a bit with Ruby. I tried Poignant three or four times, and each time I would put it down after half an hour, with the same thought - "Why is this book, widely regarded as the One True Way to learn Ruby, fucking around so much? I don't want foxes and cartoons, I want syntax, rules, conventions, and information."
Maybe it's just me, but the way I tend to learn a new language is with a bunch of docs on one screen, and an IDE/REPL on the other. I read some stuff from the doc, try it out on the other screen, and move one. After a few units of time doing that, I'll write up a trivial project to try and make the various bits I've learned work together. Once that's done, I'll have a sufficient grasp of the syntax and general themes of the language that I can dig deeper into various parts of it to learn what I need to keep going.
You know what the "best" language book I've read is? K&R, ore more precisely, K&R2. It gets to the point, and tells you exactly what you need to know about what you looked up in very clear and exact language. It doesn't hold your hand, and it doesn't make you read about foxes.
Poignant always seemed like it was designed for someone who had no idea what programming was and wanted to end up being somewhat fluent in Ruby. That's good and all - there's certainly a market for that - but not what I look for when I'm in the market for a book on a programming language.
EDIT: Why the downmod - casual use of the f-bomb or contravention of established orthodoxy?
Re: The Most Unusual (and Best) Computer Language Book I've Ever Seen.
#5I love the poignant guide! It (along with Ruby being an awesome language) got me into Ruby. It's great because you read it because you enjoy it, and then you happen to learn Ruby in the process. It also has some interesting analogies, examples, and ways to remember things. When talking about how block variables go inside |pipes|, he says: I like to think of the pipe characters as representing a tunnel. They give the…
Indeed. You get the sense when reading it, that the author was having a blast writing it, which makes learning Ruby fun. Also, the way its written is almost like a captivating book, so you can't help but dive further in.
I remember picking up 'The Ruby Programming Language' written by Matz, got to the 2nd chapter before I hopped online and found the poignant guide. Made for a much more interesting time learning Ruby.
Re: The Most Unusual (and Best) Computer Language Book I've Ever Seen.
#6Unusual? Certainly. Best? Not for me. I had some time this past summer and decided that I wanted to experiment a bit with Ruby. I tried Poignant three or four times, and each time I would put it down after half an hour, with the same thought - "Why is this book, widely regarded as the One True Way to learn Ruby, fucking around so much? I don't want foxes and cartoons, I want syntax, rules, conventions, and informatio…
Same. The first time i tried to read it I actually thought it was a joke.
Re: The Most Unusual (and Best) Computer Language Book I've Ever Seen.
#7Unusual? Certainly. Best? Not for me. I had some time this past summer and decided that I wanted to experiment a bit with Ruby. I tried Poignant three or four times, and each time I would put it down after half an hour, with the same thought - "Why is this book, widely regarded as the One True Way to learn Ruby, fucking around so much? I don't want foxes and cartoons, I want syntax, rules, conventions, and informatio…
With all due respect, if you had such trouble with Poignant, the you probably also would have had a hard time with Ruby. Not to imply that you couldn't understand Ruby or write in Ruby, but just that Ruby has a very distinct character, a personality almost, and I suspect you and Ruby would not have gotten along.
For me, it's that way with Python. Honestly, Python is not fundamentally different from Ruby except this: In Python, there is "one right way". For some programmers that's a saving grace, for others it's akin to a death sentence. To each his/her own...
Re: The Most Unusual (and Best) Computer Language Book I've Ever Seen.
#8I love the poignant guide! It (along with Ruby being an awesome language) got me into Ruby. It's great because you read it because you enjoy it, and then you happen to learn Ruby in the process. It also has some interesting analogies, examples, and ways to remember things. When talking about how block variables go inside |pipes|, he says: I like to think of the pipe characters as representing a tunnel. They give the…
Indeed. You get the sense when reading it, that the author was having a blast writing it, which makes learning Ruby fun. Also, the way its written is almost like a captivating book, so you can't help but dive further in. I remember picking up 'The Ruby Programming Language' written by Matz, got to the 2nd chapter before I hopped online and found the poignant guide. Made for a much more interesting time learning Ruby.
For what it's worth, _why did the illustrations for Matz's book too...
Re: The Most Unusual (and Best) Computer Language Book I've Ever Seen.
#9Unusual? Certainly. Best? Not for me. I had some time this past summer and decided that I wanted to experiment a bit with Ruby. I tried Poignant three or four times, and each time I would put it down after half an hour, with the same thought - "Why is this book, widely regarded as the One True Way to learn Ruby, fucking around so much? I don't want foxes and cartoons, I want syntax, rules, conventions, and informatio…
With all due respect, if you had such trouble with Poignant , the you probably also would have had a hard time with Ruby. Not to imply that you couldn't understand Ruby or write in Ruby, but just that Ruby has a very distinct character, a personality almost, and I suspect you and Ruby would not have gotten along. For me, it's that way with Python. Honestly, Python is not fundamentally different from Ruby except this:…
I don't believe I agree. Ruby is straightforward; I don't have any trouble at all understanding it. I enjoy _why's cartoons. That doesn't mean that reading _why's cartoons is in any way a good way (for me) to learn Ruby, which is a counterexample to your "probably".
Ruby is hardly difficult.
(For the sake of anecdotes: I find Python to be stultifyingly simplistic, with a number of negative features, and generally poor libraries. I find Ruby to be the wrong balance between dynamism and performance. I find both of them to lack syntactic abstraction.)
Re: The Most Unusual (and Best) Computer Language Book I've Ever Seen.
#10Unusual? Certainly. Best? Not for me. I had some time this past summer and decided that I wanted to experiment a bit with Ruby. I tried Poignant three or four times, and each time I would put it down after half an hour, with the same thought - "Why is this book, widely regarded as the One True Way to learn Ruby, fucking around so much? I don't want foxes and cartoons, I want syntax, rules, conventions, and informatio…
Agreed. It takes maybe a half hour of experimenting to know enough of the syntax of a language to start being mildly productive, and the rest of the time is spent trying to learn the standard library and language specific idioms -- which can take years. This is one reason why I've always found the PHP.net website to be useful, despite the fact that PHP has a significant number of serious warts. Admittedly, it could use a lot of work, the comments are less than spectacular, and some of the things it suggests are downright dangerous, but it's an excellent reference for the list of functions, how to use a function, and often times when to use a function -- unlike many language intro and function reference works. Let's say I want to do a DNS lookup. The PHP docs for dns_get_record are overly complete, you're well on your way to starting to use that (the problem with PHP is deciding _which_ of the four or five functions that do the same thing you should use, not a walk in the park either, I know). At ruby-doc.org, the docs for Resolv::DNS don't appear to include any examples, and the method prototypes listed link to the code for the method. Why would I want to see that?! I'm using a library so I don't need to know how the code works. I learned perl and a lot of other languages from complete, working programs, not samples a handful of lines long that performed contrived actions just for the sake of having an example.