Ruby Book: I'm Sure Pickaxe Is Great

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

I've been getting a lot of enthusiasm and feedback thrown my way since announcing my Ruby learning project and one consistent point raised has been about how great the Dave Thomas book on Ruby is. I said as much in my initial post but it was a bit longish and the point may have been buried in there: I agree, the book looks like a winner, I loved "Journeyman to Master" and the pickaxe will definitely go in my library. I just don't think it's best for initially learning the language and the "one chapter a day for three weeks" format of the Sams book that we'll be using fits the blogging experiment much better than a reference book. If I knew Ruby well enough to estimate how long each chapter would take in order to slice them up accordingly, I'd already know Ruby!

From what I gather (and there was a bit of support along those lines in my thread at the Ruby Google Group), Dave's book is more for people that are already programming for a living in other languages and looking to transfer their skill sets. That's not me! I'm coming at it from the client side and looking to expand my design chops into including the backend too, at least for the majority of projects that I do. My clients have been very happy with the interactivity that comes with adding a "News & Events" section to their sites with weblog tools - they feel so empowered over their content, like it's not just some scary technical thing that an expensive expert has to dissect but something approachable that they can lovingly maintain. This isn't a level of service that they expect to get for a small to mid-sized project, especially not something that looks good (you're a designer? and a programmer?!?!?) and I want to give them more of that feeling.

So, to sum up, I need more of a beginner's book, with an eye towards the pickaxe for getting even better later. Who knows? Like I said in the "Future" section of my initial post, if this proves useful to me and others, maybe I'll repeat the experiment again for other books.

And can someone tell me why they keep calling it pickaxe? Anyone? Please?

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