I just finished reading my first Ruby book. Please, no booing or hissing. I’ve avoided Ruby for long enough. It’s time I learn enough about the language to make an educated decision on if I want to use it or not. Up until now I just ignored it because the hype was deafening.
Anyhow, the book Learn To Program is great! It’s geared to a person that has never programed. And I thought that that would be a neat perspective to get when learning something new to me, vastly different then my bread-n-butter language, Java. The book was short, entertaining, and informative. I feel it provided enough info that I could actually get busy with Ruby. However, I’ll be ordering the PickAxe book tomorrow (definitely buying it from Nerdbooks).
A couple observations on Ruby.
1. It seems so odd, not having to declare instance vars before using them in methods.
2. How could there be an IDE for Ruby, that provides as much as Eclipse does for Java, with all the flexibility and simplicity that the Ruby lang provides a developer.
3. Do Ruby developers really use Procs?