O'Reilly's "The Ruby Language" for $9.99 (limited time) | Hacker News Reader

O'Reilly's "The Ruby Language" for $9.99 (limited time)

oreilly.com

28 pointspjonesdotca24 comments

I'm not a shill. I promise.

Also has illustrations from _why, so could mean it's got some collectible status?

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I happened upon that PDF yesterday on scribd via google. I was pondering between purchasing the $25 PDF edition of Programming Ruby 1.9 (http://www.pragprog.com/titles/ruby3/programming-ruby-1-9) and this one. I was surprised to see this price, which had apparently been adjusted a few hours prior. I purchased it because it was written by the author of Ruby, was twice as affordable, and because the preview on scribd contained a lot more pages for me to help base my decision on. It also covers Ruby 1.8, as well.

The quality of the PDF is immaculate. Only the cover pages are scanned in: the rest of it is glorious vector text and graphics, allowing one to zoom in and out as much as they could want, similar to what I like to do when reading web sites. It's also searchable, which regular books are not.

The fact that it's a digital work forces one to scan the book, skipping past parts one recognizes, putting in practice those they don't.

Finally, a digital edition enables one to easily copy-paste those parts of code he or she doesn't feel like typing out themselves.

I can never bring myself to buy ebooks it just isn't worth it to read on a screen I hate it. This is tempting but it still seems like a waste.

Print is always better than digital in my opinion though I haven't tried a kindle yet.

Haven't tried many technical books yet, but the Kindle is incredible. Highly recommended if you read a lot.

Go with the full size Kindle for comfortable reading of PDFs.

It's 11 dollars used on amazon, I'm going to opt for that one instead. I am fully with you on ebooks, reading books on screen isn't pleasurable for me at all.

edit: amazon has it for 8 dollars for the kindle( which can be read on am iphone if you're so inclined)

I bought the hard copy on amazon a few weeks ago. Best ruby books I've seen. It ranks high compared to 'best of' books for other langs as well.

Speaking of iPhone, the book is available as an iPhone app for $4.99:

http://appshopper.com/books/the-ruby-programming-language

They say that they worked with Lexcycle, makers of Stanza, the iPhone ebook-reader, to make this work well.

At the bottom of the page are 5 screenshots showing how the book looks on an iPhone.

I don't mind reading programming books on the computer. If you like to try the examples as you're reading, it saves you from having to move between the dim pages of the book and the bright computer screen.

For a novel, though, I definitely prefer the Kindle or a real book. (Real books annoy me now, because they are harder to hold. They are too springy, and fighting that gets tiring. Yes... I am lazy...)

Haha, I feel you :)

This is the best Ruby book out there, in my opinion. Especially for experienced developers, it explains all the language features in simple and straightforward terms.

Ebook is the only way to go for this. I have this book one click away at all times (via launchbar on osx), for quick reference.

If you enter the promo code "LREL40", you get further discount to $5.99. Confirmed, I've just bought with that code and it's indeed $5.99.

Worked for me too. $6 for a bad ass book. Thanks for posting

Can anyone comment on whether this book would be a better purchase compared to Cooper's Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1430223634/ref=pd_luc_sbs_0...

This book is really good. I had read the Pickaxe before I picked this one up, so I'm not sure whether it's a good introductory book for Ruby. I haven't read Beginning Ruby either, so I can't compare. Nonetheless, if you're going to be working with Ruby I definitely recommend getting this book at some point. Why not now when it's cheap?

True, I was drawn to beginning ruby because it covered web application development and frameworks( both to an extent)

While I understand your comment, as someone who's fortunate enough to be paid to program in Ruby, I find it a little sad that Ruby is considered mostly in Rails terms.

While I was unemployed, one of the recruiters I was with mentioned that they referred to me as the "Ruby on Rails" guy. Which kinda sucked because they were only looking at jobs for me with "web" application.

I turned around and wrote a FXRuby wrapper for ai4r that can be run on the desktop sort of as a reaction to show that Ruby can run on the desktop too.

Do you want "how to program?" or a "clear and concise guide to ruby?". If its the later, this fairly new O'Reilly "The Ruby Programming Language" is the only way to go.

I find "The Well-Grounded Rubyist" by David Black to be an excellent intro to Ruby. My only comparison is with the Pickaxe, to which it is superior (clearer, scales to different experience levels, not overloaded as a reference).

For that price you can usually just buy the real book brand new from the new & used section of amazon.com. I've been saving some good money with that. If you just be careful with the feedback ratings and not really trust the lowest price you will probably get a real new book as advertised and save some good money.

Aww, I was so hoping this was a print edition. That would be a steal. Here's to badly written link titles!

It's a PDF, right?

It's an experiment, there are more e-books available for that price, including several Perl books: http://use.perl.org/~brian_d_foy/journal/39524

Hm. When I cliked on the Ebook "Add to Cart", Opera complained that the encryption key length was too short, and thus that the site was insufficiently secure.

Opera is correct. https://epoch.oreilly.com is using a 512-bit RSA key.

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