Comment by tferris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tferris | Hacker News Reader

I've just bought this book as well to get a deeper understanding of Rails (and also to get a newer book on Rails, most are aged).

While the first chapters are a refreshing take on Rails and easy to understand the book is getting kind of cloudy later when covering more complex topics. Cumbersome explanations followed by wack examples give you a hard time—you cannot easily grasp basic ideas, so you constantly switch between examples and theory but you just don't get it.

Especially, chapter 13 (on Singleton methods) is miserable. Admitting Ruby's Singleton Pattern isn't the easiest thing the book totally failed from here: I read this chapter dozen times until I gave up and just googled better explanations and I am sorry to say that every blog post about the Singleton Pattern did a far, far better job than this book. And from this point I did it with all following chapters—just scanned them briefly and googled better articles for respective subjects. This book was definitely not worth the money but at least I did again some Rails theory with the book as guideline.

In all fairness, it makes it pretty tough to take your comment seriously when you consistently refer to Rails when you mean Ruby.

Also, I have to disagree. Like the author of the post, I found Olsen's book to be a delightful read. It is certainly not a great "first book" on Ruby, however. I think you ought to read it once you've gained a little better understanding - its wonderful for smoothing out edges and cementing some of the more advanced concepts.

Good point with 'Rails'—my mistake—and I understand that now my competence could be questioned. I meant Ruby of course (which is Rails' core and if you got Ruby well you are a much better Rails dev and I think that's the #1 reason when reading Ruby books => Rails).

I appreciate the author and his work but frankly: I got so frustrated with the style. Go and read chapter 13 and compare all the blog posts about Singleton out there (it's a huge difference). Reading one chapter again and again just to see that someone on StackOverflow drew a far better picture doesn't make you happy. Or take the next chapter 14 about class instance variables: this topic is brought to the reader in a very verbose style and again, the net full of blogs and Q&As deliver better much results. People there even discuss and question the benefit or real-world usage of class instance variables which is fully omitted in the book.

>> its wonderful for smoothing out edges and cementing some of the more advanced concepts

Sorry, I totally disagree, especially the advanced stuff is delivered in better quality in the net. Don't get me wrong but your words sound like the typical not-helpful Amazon reviews (which made me buying this book). BTW, there more annoying parts like squeezing every subject at the end of a chapter in a monotone structure ("Staying out of trouble", "In the wild", etc.) which is getting boring quickly, doesn't give one a better understanding and feels like the author going through his checklist for every chapter.

Ruby's terminology is confusing here, but singleton methods have very little to do with the Singleton Pattern.

The Singleton Pattern is a way to design a class that ensures at runtime that only one instance of that class ever exists. Singleton methods are (effectively) methods defined on a particular object rather than being defined for all objects of a single class.

The terminology is actually correct, because the way singleton methods work is by generating an anonymous class to which only the object at hand belongs (thus that anonymous class is an example of the singleton pattern) and defining the method there, but if what you're interested in is how to define your own singleton classes then understanding singleton methods doesn't help you, and vice versa.

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