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by James Britt.
Original Post: Beginning Ruby - The Book
Feed Title: James Britt: Ruby Development
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Feed Description: James Britt: Playing with better toys
Once upon a time, way back in 2001, I contacted an editor at Wrox about doing a Ruby book. I had in mind to cover Ruby and XML.
The folks at Wrox were interested, but didn't want a single-topic Ruby book without there first being something more fundamental.
At the time there was Programming Ruby, by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, and, I think, the first edition of The Ruby Way. I thought these two did (at least) a sufficient job of introducing Ruby that writing Yet Another "Here's Ruby" tome would be unproductive.
Wrox disagreed, wanting their own entry in that realm, so I agreed to write Beginning Ruby.
Long, horrible story made short: Much time and effort reading the Ruby source, testing code, working out examples, and trying to be both accurate and interesting while presenting the material in a manner different the other Ruby books. Half-way through, the tech book market goes south, and Wrox goes bankrupt. Poor James has 300 pages of a Ruby book sitting on his hard drive and no clear idea on what to make of it.
I had registered the domain beginningruby.com, with the idea of finishing the work on-line, but for various reasons it stayed an eternal "One day ..." project.
Time goes by, Ruby gets more attention, the tech book market perks up, and now there are roughly 40 Ruby books out or on their way.
During those years I occasionally looked at what I wrote, and thought about what it would take to fix it up, get it out, and maybe make a buck off it. There were two big problems. First, Ruby had changed. While I was writing against some version of 1.7 or 1.8, I knew that I would have to retread a lot of ground to make sure the technical details were correct.
And that's a lot of work.
The bigger issue was that the writing was, in many ways, tedious. While Wrox encouraged a certain casual style, there was also a heavy emphasis on detail and content that often strolled across the border from Fascinationville to to Filler Town. (At that time at least; the brand has been revived by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and the editorial dictates may have changed.) So I had large chunks of seriously verbose text covering areas of marginal value.
On the one hand, it seemed a shame to let that much work just fade way into so many bits. On the other hand, bad writing is bad writing.
Despite the surge of interest in Ruby, and the glut of books, I've seen very little written that helps prepare a beginning Rubyist to really think in Ruby. People coming to Ruby from VB or Java or PHP or whatever are given very little to break them of habits and preconceptions acquired from these languages. Likewise, total programming newbies are tossed a lot syntax and examples, but are mostly left on their own to "grok" Ruby.
(There is at least one very notable exception: Ruby for Rails, by David A. Black. Whenever I speak to people about learning Ruby, I encourage them to get a copy of Programming Ruby for its general syntax and language reference, and then to get David's book so as to get a more meaningful understanding of the language.)
I've decided to give Beginning Ruby another shot at daylight. At the moment I have no idea how much, if any, of the previous writing will be used. I am fairly certain that I will omit much discussion of syntax and mechanics. There are just too many good, free, resources for that right now. Likewise, it seems foolish to waste much time and space on explaining how get and install Ruby. Instead, what I hope to focus on are the interesting bits, the conceptual aspects, more semantics than syntax.
I've given a few Ruby talks in the Phoenix area, each time trying to refine my approach to introducing Ruby. Ive come to appreciate that people much prefer a succinct presentation of the salient facts to a warehouse of distracting detail.
(Additional clarification: I'm not referring to books such as Hal Fulton's The Ruby Way, or O'Reilly's Ruby Cookbook. These are targeting people looking for catalogs of solutions and details. My gripe is with books that replace focused insight with bloated examples, repetitive code, and trivial detail.)
As of this very moment there is little more than some place holder, "coming soon!" content on the site. I've gotten sidetracked writing Yet Another, No, Seriously, Really Cool Publishing Tool. I think I've now made it as small and feature-free as I can while retaining essential behavior.
I'm now sort of hoping that announcing my plans will compel me to work on content instead of code.
We'll see. In any event, it's an alpha book, with much being made up as I go along.
I do need to add a decent commenting system, though, as reader fedback is essential. An early (pre-alpha?) version of the site had some nice JavaScript DHTML for adding comments specific chunks of text. I thought it was super bad until I scoped out the commening system for The Django Book.
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