What's your favorite Ruby book?

ruby-talk
1

I agree strongly. I enjoyed the electronic version of the book (Pickaxe) I
picked up the print version at Borders a couple of days ago.

Christopher J. Meisenzahl CPS, CSTE
Senior Software Testing Consultant
Spherion
christopher.j.meisenzahl@citicorp.com

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-----Original Message-----
From: cyclists [mailto:cyclists@nc.rr.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2002 7:42 PM
To: ruby-talk
Cc: cyclists
Subject: Re: What’s your favorite Ruby book?

On Thu, 14 Nov 2002 22:25:20 +0900, Michael C. Libby wrote:

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On Wednesday 13 November 2002 09:57, Tim Hunter wrote:

If you’re a serious Ruby developer, you’ll need The Ruby Way

Can you explain this further? Maybe I’m not serious enough
about Ruby
development, but I’ve taken several ganders at “The Ruby
Way” and didn’t
feel compelled to buy it because it lacked depth in many of
the areas
where I’d have wanted it the most (the GUI toolkits sections are
particularly light, imho).

Well, I’m not interested in the GUI toolkits so those pages
remain unread. For me, Chapters 1 thru 5 were worth the price
of the book.

My favorite Ruby book is the Pickaxe, especially since it’s
licensed
under
the OPL… even better that Dave and Andy made it available
as HTML.
Having that as a resource during my first week of Ruby programming
(without having to buy it) was invaluable-- without it I
wonder if I would
have ever felt compelled to use Ruby when I was already
quite happy with
Perl… this also led me to buy the book fairly quickly thereafter.

In fact, if other English-language Ruby books were licensed OPL and
available on the net, I would buy hardcopy just to show my
support-- even
if they weren’t as useful to me as the Pickaxe.

Good man! I think it’s important to keep in mind that if we
want publishers to
publish books about Ruby then we need to be buying books about Ruby. I
think in general the folks at SAMS and Addison Wesley don’t
care about the
OPL as much as they care about the BUX. I want to encourage
Dave/Andy/Hal/Matz/Lyle, et. al. to keep on thinking about Ruby, write
down what they think, and then tell me what they figured out in a book
that I can keep next to my keyboard.

-michael
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