Whys poignant guide to ruby book

Showing Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of why's poignant guide to ruby. Sep 29, Paul Morganthall rated it it was amazing.

Short, quirky, endearing, and poignant guide to a simple computer programming language, Ruby. You'll need a sense of humor and some lateral thinking to enjoy this book. Give it a try! Also available at poignant. Deven marked it as to-read Nov 06, There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Be the first to start one ». About Why The Lucky Stiff. Why The Lucky Stiff. His best known work is Why's poignant Guide to Ruby, which "teaches Ruby with stories.

On 19 August , his online presence was drastically truncated; his accounts on Twitter and GitHub were shut down, along with many of his personally maintained sites. Language: English. Brand new Book. It won't crush you. It's light as a feather because I haven't finished it yet-hehe.

And there's a reason this book will stay light: because Ruby is simple to learn. Seller Inventory APC More information about this seller Contact this seller. Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory n.

Seller Inventory ING This item is printed on demand. New copy - Usually dispatched within working days. This book is also a great example of common geekish English - I'll use stories from it as a reference themes for small talk in case I'll have too much attention from This guy is positively insane : I suspect, Ruby-related stuff from the book could be fit on to a single A4 cheat sheet, while a number of story lines included made the thing bloat quite a bit.

This book is also a great example of common geekish English - I'll use stories from it as a reference themes for small talk in case I'll have too much attention from the opposite gender : Ah, yeah, comics are awesome : Beard vs skeleton, he-he Oct 03, Burton Kent rated it it was ok.

Reminds me of a Lewis Carroll "Alice in Wonderland" story written in the first person. Actually it's arguable what "person" it's written in. It's funny but after awhile the "novel" part gets distracting. I'm on chapter 5 and I give up. He's telling a story and dropping little bits of Ruby in it, it's not helping me learn or structure how I think about Ruby. If anything it's getting annoying and ruining Ruby for me. Other people might learn differently and get something out of it.

I'd like more s Reminds me of a Lewis Carroll "Alice in Wonderland" story written in the first person. I'd like more structure and less drug-induced story. Jul 28, Jared Housh rated it really liked it. This is a programming book Ruby for the criminally insane, as a friend put it. This is, without a doubt, the best programming book I've ever read an admittedly low bar. The sidebars and illustrations alone make this book worth reading.

On the flip side, I'm not sure I retained much about Ruby. I did, however, come away with Chunky Bacon, so all is not lost. Dec 29, Mihai Damian rated it really liked it. This is definitely like no other programming book you've ever read; exactly as why promises in the book's introduction. If you expect a clean introduction to Ruby then this is not the book for the job. Jun 10, Venkatesh-Prasad rated it it was ok. While I am fine with story-based approach to technical topics, I think they are hard to get right and they need to be done "right" for the reader.

In this sense, this was not my cup of tea. I thought it had too much story than content about Ruby; hence, too slow for my taste. I gave up after four chapters. Dec 03, Joy rated it really liked it. May 02, chris tierney rated it it was ok Shelves: programming , nonfiction. Entertaining and provides some good mnemonics for ruby syntax. Unfortunately it goes downhill near the end as the details about ruby take a back seat to the weird story, and it remains probably forever unfinished.

Apr 02, Michael rated it did not like it Shelves: work. Add me to the "didn't get it" bucket. Overly verbose with horrible examples and a very weak grasp on actually teaching. If you're looking for a programming story, this might work out for you. If you actually want to learn Ruby, run far, far away. Apr 21, Piotr Zurek rated it it was amazing. Definitely worth the read, not necessarily to learn Ruby.

Jan 07, Leah rated it did not like it Shelves: non-fiction , ebooks , work. It had some good bits of code, but they were hidden behind so much nonsense that I got distracted and don't feel like I actually learned much. Jul 11, Craig Vermeer rated it liked it Shelves: tech. A programming book written by a crazy person. Aug 29, Stijn rated it really liked it. I found it to be one of the few Ruby resources that actually gives me a succinct overview of the language with some of its intuition.

I skipped most of the cartoons or the story lines that were not directly related to Ruby syntax and semantics which was easy to do. Aug 26, Vinicius rated it really liked it.

Very good book, much more than a simple guide to Ruby, an adventure beyond the strange imagination of Why's the Lucky Stiff, a must-read to new Rubyists, and to someone who is learning how-to programming. Apr 18, Chrisman rated it it was amazing Shelves: programming. A true classic though. Jul 10, Latitude rated it it was amazing. I would credit this book with the reason I started finding computer programming interesting.

Dec 26, J Angel rated it it was amazing. If there was a 6 this is a 6. Oct 31, David rated it liked it Shelves: technical. That could be a good or a bad thing, depending on who you ask. I'm undecided. The whole thing is almost too quirky. But I love the ideas behind the book, and the union it draws between art and creativity and programming and logic -- there's a false dichotomy of creatives vs.

It's enough that something like this exists to show how fun and creative programming should be. I love the way that, for example, this bit of story just drops into tutorial mode with no fan-fare. And also I learned a couple new Ruby tricks, which was cool -- I previously had no idea about most of the crazy useful global variables, for instance.

The book doesn't really have any practical code examples, unless you have a real use-case for umop-apisdn fxaf. Should it? Not really, no -- I think the point is just to have fun doing silly stuff with code something Ruby is very good for.

But I wonder how accessible it all is. The Poignant Guide at some places seems like it's concerned with teaching people new to programming, using vivid metaphors for different bits of syntax -- an array [1,2,3,4] is a caterpillar between two staples the commas are its legs -- but even from the beginning the examples have a programmer mindset that's intimate with directory structures and file names, and that's very fastidious and precise about chopping up strings of text and manipulating them, always mindful of whitespace and linebreaks -- a brain that already thinks like a compiler.

So I'm not sure I'd recommend this book as a programming introduction, which is a bit of a shame. But then you probably shouldn't learn Ruby as a first language, if only because it'll spoil you for anything else with all its syntactic sugar and custom loop functions.