Book Review: Learn To Program (with Ruby)
March 31, 2006
This concise book (149 pages) uses Ruby to teach basic programming; a good book for total green-horns to programming. But keep in mind this book is not titled: ‘Learn to Program Ruby’.
What I mean by that, is that the book targets new programmers, not programmers new to Ruby. So it may be a little slow for some people (experienced programmers) when the author (for example,) explains what an array is …
WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK INTERESTING
The book is well written and the flows well, but what I find interesting about it is:
- It uses Ruby to teach programming.
- It teaches some interesting concepts that you might not read in say, a PHP book.
Ruby is the hot new language in the geek world, but it has yet to show itself substantially in commercial application. That said, it is an interesting language choice for this kind of book: Ruby is a terse and easy to use language, and I think this allowed for the author to jump into concepts like recursion and procs – I like this.
CONCLUSION
A good book that is not so pragmatic, in that you don’t see the typical how to build a shopping cart project at the end.
Instead, the author concentrates on basic programming concepts and leaves it to another book to expose the reader to real-life application.
I would use this book in a programming 101 type of class.
