Pickaxe

[Dark Ambient]

I've been reading the pickaxe book the last few days. As a newbie to
both Ruby and programming I have to say it's packed with an incredible
amount of information. I'm still in part 1 and just going through the
section on Regular Expressions. I find this section in particular to
be quite a challenge.

Two questions then:
Is the book more of a reference, read through and always come back too ?
Is is a good idea to have a project started at some point , perhaps
after the first section ?

TIA
Stuart

 

[Robert Klemme]

I've been reading the pickaxe book the last few days. As a newbie to
both Ruby and programming I have to say it's packed with an incredible
amount of information. I'm still in part 1 and just going through the
section on Regular Expressions. I find this section in particular to
be quite a challenge.

Two questions then:
Is the book more of a reference, read through and always come back too ?
Is is a good idea to have a project started at some point , perhaps
after the first section ?

Yeah, your intuition is probably right. It's not exactly an
introduction to programming in general - although those can also be
found on the web ("learning to program" etc.). And I definitively use
it as reference quite often.

Cheers

robert

 

[Dark Ambient]

Weren't you a contributor ?

Stuart

Yeah, your intuition is probably right. It's not exactly an
introduction to programming in general - although those can also be
found on the web ("learning to program" etc.). And I definitively use
it as reference quite often.

Cheers

robert

 

[Robert Klemme]

Weren't you a contributor ?

Yes, I proofread the multithreading section and I think I also provided
some input on the code samples.

robert

 

[Dark Ambient]

Thanks James, I have Learn to Program and have been using it but
thought I'd diversify a bit in between those incredibly difficult
programming challenges in Chris Pine's book. For me Learning to
Program is a great book primarily because of the exercises. I wish
more books had assignments in them. I came to Ruby after checking out
Rails at first and wish that a book like Agile Web Development had
some exercises to allow newbs to get their feet wet. I've always
found the "tutorial/working through building an application" approach
to be limited in some ways, just my personal taste I guess.

Stuart

Stuart

 

[Chris Pine]

For me Learning to Program is a great book primarily because of the exercises.
Thanks!

I wish more books had assignments in them.

Well, it took me a really long time to come up with challenging (but
hopefully not *too* hard) exercises that weren't totally boring. I
bet I spent at least half of the time just coming up with exercises,
trying them, throwing them out...

Maybe I'm just a better programmer than I am a creative thinker, but I
found coming up with the exercises much harder than solving them (or
even writing the rest of the book).

Chris