Why's poignant guide to metaprogramming in Ruby | Hacker News Reader

Why's poignant guide to metaprogramming in Ruby

poignantguide.net

29 pointsmaryrosecook7 comments

The central theme of this book, to me: programming should be fun. Have fun.

The Poignant Guide is how I learned Ruby and remains my favorite technical book. If you're at all curious about Ruby as a language, spend some time reading the first few pages (or just browse the comics). There's much more to Ruby than Rails - if you've no interest in web dev, or just want to hack around, you will be right at home.

This is programming for the type of person who cannot retain information from blobs of code and small text snippets(ie. All programming books)

You find these sort of things in the little schemer and such.I loved hist first guide and it taught me alot.

I love ruby, but reading why's guides didn't help me at all when I learned ruby. I liked them though, but it didn't help me understand anything, more like watching an episode of Professor Baltazar - fun and incomprehensible.

I learned Ruby from the Poignant Guide. I thought it was quite a fun way to learn. I think part of the secret is that the text was so puzzling and jokey that I found myself using the code to help figure out what was going on. If you don't read the code, you can't get the jokes. By the time I was finished, I was trained: now I subconsciously expect Ruby code to be more comprehensible than English itself!

I also printed it out and read it from paper, which helps because it makes it easier to hold your head in your hands and stare at one example for minutes at a time. I think I must have spent an hour contemplating the enormous implications of Dwemthy's Array.

I'm afraid I have to agree with jayz's dead comment: "obnoxiously twee" is a pretty good description of this guy's writing style.

I'm sure some people like it, but I'm not one of them.

That is worth reading for the comics alone.

read it many years ago. but reading it again it is just as good (even my non-programming girlfriend enjoys it!)

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