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Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

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Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#111

Post by masto »

nicebyte wrote: post #34

this is legitimately the worst programming book i've ever read. i wanted to get started with ruby back in 2009, and everyone was praising this book. i got it, read the first few chapters, and got bored out of my mind. it meanders and takes forever to get to the point. in the end, i never really learned ruby, and the main cause was this book.

I have to agree, but I wouldn’t be a dick about it. Lots of people enjoyed this book. For me, I can’t get through the first 30 seconds. My brain just rebels against this style. Partly because there’s something wrong with me, I can’t understand comics. Doesn’t mean it’s the worst book ever, it just doesn’t work for me. But it did have the effect of turning me off Ruby permanently.

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#112

Post by cambalache »

nicebyte wrote: post #42
thom wrote: post #12

I've always felt this was a singular achievement, one which perfectly captured the spirit of its author, the community he inhabited, and a particular zeitgeist in programming and on the internet. The need for various other authors to attempt to replicate it for other languages by creating rambling, twee books with wacky titles and comic characters of their own, I've frankly found a bit sad and underwhelming. It's a b…

i don't think it was even funny the first time. reading this stuff i always feel like the author is trying to keep my attention by jiggling some car keys in front of my face as if i am an infant. this applies to books like learn you a haskell too.

I agree, but I really hate those books that try to be funny and quirky when trying to explain a technical subject. Give me K&R every single time.

The problem is not the humor or the silliness, the problem is that for a newbie it is impossible to distinguish what it is important from what is not, what is an exaggerated truth for comic effect and what it isnt. This is a sin very common in popular science/technical books.

"Dont worry about not understanding General Relativity. In a certain sense the concept is very simple, space bends according to the mass/energy distribution like fabric under a heavy ball (maybe the bowling ball of your uncle Bob), so it becomes curved.... and that's why you derive the Christoffel symbols from the Lagrangian of the equation of motion under a given metric.

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#113

Post by devilduck »

leetrout wrote: post #87
uncomputation wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It really is a pretentiousness held in a group of language zealots. Can’t tell if this is ironic or not, but Rubyists are pretty well known as the friendliest out of all language communities, and have been for over a decade now

No, I’m not being ironic. And as an entire, stereotyped group Rubyists sure are nice. Pretentious doesn’t mean rude or unwelcoming and I don’t want to insinuate that.

It's great to have an opinion, but the idea of believing that Rubyists are a pretentious group of people, that itself is pretty pretentious. Beware your own pits lest you fall into them yourself

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#114

Post by stephenhuey »

nicebyte wrote: post #67
allworknoplay wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... the main cause was this book." Sorry, but blaming a single book for not learning something when there are an enormous number of other resources (and have been all along -- _why's was a long time ago, but so were, say Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails and the others mentioned here, and there has long been tons free on the web) probably means _you_ were actually the main cause.

sorry but no. there's a lot of programming languages out there and it's the job that the programming language and its community to convince me to use it when there are many alternatives to choose from. i don't have time to commit to learning any random programming language that pops into my field of vision at all costs. a language is a tool. a tool was being marketed to me as something of high quality. i tried it, bu…

This is a bit like saying you don’t like television because one day you tried one episode from one particularly unusual show from one specific genre and decided after that you would just listen to the radio since television failed to win you over, as if none of the other shows you never tried could ever possibly work for you.

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#115

Post by nurettin »

valbaca wrote: post #22
thom wrote: post #12

I've always felt this was a singular achievement, one which perfectly captured the spirit of its author, the community he inhabited, and a particular zeitgeist in programming and on the internet. The need for various other authors to attempt to replicate it for other languages by creating rambling, twee books with wacky titles and comic characters of their own, I've frankly found a bit sad and underwhelming. It's a b…

This about sums up most Monty Python and Rick & Morty references as well. A lot of nerd/hacker culture falls into this kind of recognition of unique humor and wit, then squeezing every little drop of joy out of it until it's as empty as a Garfield cartoon.

xkcd is the elephant in the room.

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#116

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

thom wrote: post #12

I've always felt this was a singular achievement, one which perfectly captured the spirit of its author, the community he inhabited, and a particular zeitgeist in programming and on the internet. The need for various other authors to attempt to replicate it for other languages by creating rambling, twee books with wacky titles and comic characters of their own, I've frankly found a bit sad and underwhelming. It's a b…

there is a documentary about _why, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64anPPVUw5U

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#117

Post by RangerScience »

cambalache wrote: post #112
nicebyte wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't think it was even funny the first time. reading this stuff i always feel like the author is trying to keep my attention by jiggling some car keys in front of my face as if i am an infant. this applies to books like learn you a haskell too.

I agree, but I really hate those books that try to be funny and quirky when trying to explain a technical subject. Give me K&R every single time. The problem is not the humor or the silliness, the problem is that for a newbie it is impossible to distinguish what it is important from what is not, what is an exaggerated truth for comic effect and what it isnt. This is a sin very common in popular science/technical book…

There are two kinds of people who are trying to learn code: Those who already think like a programmer, and those who don't.

K&R is for one of those. _why's guide is for the other.

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#118

Post by elSidCampeador »

phaedryx wrote: post #20
crtc wrote: post #13

Why do Rubyists like this convoluted and almost childish communication style?

Honestly, I would not recommend this book to somebody who wanted to learn Ruby. I wouldn't recommend this to somebody who had a serious project or task to solve. However, I love that this added flavor to the Ruby community. For years afterwards people would hide Easter eggs like "chunky bacon" in their conference slides. It was a fun inside joke to share with fellow Rubyists. I mean, Python has references to Monty Py…

I tried to learn Ruby by reading this, got nowhere. Much later when I had done a bit of writing code in Ruby I came back to this book and loved it.

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#119

Post by scruple »

tartoran wrote: post #51

Ruby is an appealing language for sure , but is it worth learning it in 2020, with the intention of getting paid for one’s work? It is an honest question and in no way am i trashing the language. Just curious what others have to say about it

> with the intention of getting paid

In one way or another, Ruby has been helping me pay my bills since 2008. I've used other languages, worked in various industries, embedded, robotics, healthcare, from freelance to full-time, etc... Ruby, SQL, and bash have been the only constants for me.

Just today, in fact, I had a phone screen for a (non-Rails) Ruby position and I'm not even really looking.

Re: Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)

#120

Post by hobby-coder-guy »

projektfu wrote: post #83

I learned basically nothing from this book. Maybe if I were a new programmer it would have helped but as an experienced programmer I found its pedagogy too distracting to learn anything. But Ruby is easy to learn and fun to use. The headline about it is that code can be executed in a class definition. If that's not broadcast right at the beginning, it'll take a long time to learn what's going on in Rails.

Pedagogy is the dumbest fucking word.
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