As some of you may know, a couple of years ago, I wrote a free Ruby
eBook called The Little Book Of Ruby. This has been downloaded many tens
of thousands of times in English and an unknown number of times in
translation. The Little Book Of Ruby is a short (10 chapter, 87 page)
eBook that covers the fundamentals of Ruby programming
The Little Book now has a big brother called simply The Book Of Ruby.
This will eventually run to over 400 pages in 20 chapters and it goes
into considerable depth - covering both the well-known and the not
so-well-known features of the Ruby language. The Book Of Ruby will be
published online one chapter at a time in PDF format. Each chapter will
come with lots of ready-to-run sample programs.
The first chapter went online today. The remaining 19 chapters will be
put online over the next few months. Oh, it’s free, by the way
This will eventually run to over 400 pages in 20 chapters and it goes
into considerable depth - covering both the well-known and the not
so-well-known features of the Ruby language.
I wouldn't consider myself as an expert at all (even though I have spent
a lot of time with ruby), but my question is:
Do you think that the book is useful to intermediate rubyistas as well?
This will eventually run to over 400 pages in 20 chapters and it goes
into considerable depth - covering both the well-known and the not
so-well-known features of the Ruby language.
I wouldn't consider myself as an expert at all (even though I have spent
a lot of time with ruby), but my question is:
Do you think that the book is useful to intermediate rubyistas as well?
Rubyists, please. Or Jewel Cutters if you are into obscure stuff. No
snakes on a plane here.
Anyway:
If the book goes as much in depth as Huw promises, I certainly think
it'll be useful for intermediates like you and me, too, especially if it
diverges from the well trodden path we usually take.
'sides: It's free, so taking a look won't hurt, and only cost you time.
I certainly plan on doing that once I have the time.
Just to clarify the 'level'... while it starts right at the beginning
('hello world'), The Book Of Ruby moves fairly rapidly onto topics that
could be categorized as 'intermediate to advanced'. Also, from chapter 2
onwards, each chapter comes with a section called 'Digging Deeper'. In
this section I will often go into some of the more arcane reaches of
Ruby - things that even fairly experienced Ruby programmers may not know
about. The only reason *I* know about some of these is that we have had
to provide deep support for Ruby in our IDE, and that means that we have
had to deal with all kinds of 'special cases' in order to get our
Intellisense, debugging etc. to work correctly and reliably. As a
consequence, I have spent a lot of time exploring the 'outer reaches' of
Ruby.
The book will cover all the main subject areas: OOP, blocks, mixins,
regex, exception handling, singletons, threads, loops and iterators,
scoping, IO, dynamic (meta)programming etc. etc.
If anyone has any questions or wants to open up the discussion on
specific subjects, please feel free either to comment on the blog or to
join the forum and start threads in the Ruby section: http://sapphiresteel.com/forum/
