[prog] Re: Ruby again

[jennyw]

On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 10:53:38PM -0500, ||svaksha|| wrote:
> there is a mailing list one can subscribe to 
> ruby-talk-ctl at ruby-lang.org    {pls note the volume of messages is very high.}

You can also read this with a news reader on news.gmane.org -- much easier!

> http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/  ...with lots of links. 
> imho, Ruby documentation is not much but the list community is very

Have you looked at ruby-doc.org?  The entire book "Programming Ruby" (1st ed.) is 
online. Other documents are there as well that might make good intros.  If you're 
interested in Web programming, there's the OnLAMP article I mentioned earlier, plus 
a longer tutorial at www.rubyonrails.org.

> I am interested in learning ruby too and willing to help too.

I'm curious -- what do people want to use Ruby to do?  Knowing that might help 
figure out the best way to go about learning it. Also, maybe people could post 
their experiences with learning Ruby in courses and any particular pitfalls they 
ran into? Also, why are people interested in Ruby?

I'll answer my own questions:

I have two main programming needs -- quick text processing and sysadminy things
that I usually use Perl and Python for, and developing multi-user applications
with database back ends (possibly Web-based).

For me, reading about a language helps, but the best way to learn is using the
language to do something I really wanted done anyway (as opposed to just
following a tutorial).  Coincidentally, I've recently had to write a few
scripts. In the past, I've used Perl and Python for these types of tasks, but
Python has the disadvantage (as far as I know) of not being able to do in-place
edits, and Perl has the disadvantage of being, well, Perl (I guess you either
love it or hate it).  

So far, using Ruby has been great ... I haven't felt much of a productivity loss
in the learning process.  I think it's easier to learn for someone completely
new to programming than Python, partly because of it being a pure OO language
where Python is a mix. For example, Python has global functions like abs().  
Ruby doesn't -- you just send the abs message to the thing you want an absolute 
value of:  -37.abs.

I'm also impressed by its reputation in the agile development community -- a lot
of people say that Ruby really lends itself to agile programming practices (e.g. 
test-first programming and refactoring). Moreover, it seems there are a lot of
people in the Ruby community who adopt techniques like test-driven development.  
That said, I haven't written any tests in RubyUnit yet, although I really should 
have ...

Jen