Book of Ruby Completed: 425 pages, 300+ Sample Programs, free | Hacker News Reader

Book of Ruby Completed: 425 pages, 300+ Sample Programs, free

sapphiresteel.com

29 pointsnickb9 comments

Having just taken a quick look - it seems like a great effort.

The only thing that throws me off is the font choice for the code examples. I'm no font-snob, but a monospace font for code just seems much more readable and friendly to programmer readers.

Regardless of the font - very glad to see a great effort like this.

I'm more worried by the style guide. Just in the screenshot, I notice a lot of oddities and inconsistencies:

  * Unnecessary parentheses abound
  * A camelCase preference over snake_case
  * And nocase ("myname")
  * Calling methods with "::" and "."
  * Curly braces instead of do..end for multiline, unchained blocks.
  * Curly braces that don't even begin to line up.
  * Strangely erratic whitespace (see parentheses)

Don't get me wrong, I love what you can do with Ruby, but this seems like a confusing thing to throw at your readers.

It worries me more that newbies who use this guide will start writing in this very un-Rubyish way and then wonder why their code doesn't get used as much or why they don't succeed at the job interviews.. There's an informal, but popular, style for a reason. This is also why books (should) have technical reviewers.

Consider the second example in chapter one that includes: name=gets() .. No true Rubyist codes that way. There's an example a couple of pages on that uses if .. then. No-one really uses then either. This is explained in the text, but why show it if it's confusing and rarely used? And why methods like get_name? That's not typical Ruby style either. It'd just be name.

That said, once you get beyond a chapter or two and ignore the quirky stylings, it's not bad and certainly has some value. I know people who had weird music teachers and learned how to play pretty well under them.. but they had to go back and relearn basic breathing and fingering techniques due to the way they were taught.

I consider myself to be a bit of a font snob, and looking at that block of example code strikes me as practically unreadable.

Obviously a lot of time and effort has gone into developing this book, it would be a shame if the project was undermined by ignoring book design and legibility.

The font bugged me too, it looks like Comic Sans MS, oh the horror.

His explanation for breaking/ignoring conventions:

http://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/8diqr/book_of_ruby_com...

I've began reading this book to patch any holes in my knowledge of ruby. My only suggestion so far is that a new typeface for the code excerpts is needed. Perhaps not necessarily courier (after reading his post on reddit) but ANY other font. I mean really - anything but comic sans. It is widely abused in the world to point where reading it gives me a head ache. Surprisingly enough, I'm not the only one!

Can anyone recommend a host (preferably free) where I can just mess around and start learning?

localhost

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