spiralofhope

Ruby > Reading >

I didn’t even finish it.

• ISBN-10 0-596-00214-9

Let’s start with a plain statement. I did not appreciate this book.

I don’t like it. I didn’t even finish it. First off, it’s a real turnoff for someone new to Ruby to learn that the book is for version 1.6. In reality this isn’t a big deal at all, and in fact this book is still quite useful to someone if this version number issue is overlooked. However, as someone who has been, quite frankly, “trained” to understand certain things about version numbers.. it is quite a terrible and demoralizing disincentive for me to pick the book up and give it any merit whatsoever.

Having said that, I should secondly mention that this style of book apparently doesn’t appeal to me at all. Yes, I realize it’s not a novel for me to read from cover to cover, and yet I did approach it that way. After a fashion I lost my interest.. for reasons which should be obvious. I then began approaching it from a problem-solving perspective, referring to it as a desktop companion.

The unfortunate thing with a reference book is that it is, in my mind, infinitely inferior to having resources online or at least on-screen. Searchability, especially for topics which I can only poorly define, are much more successful on-screen than on-paper. I did, in fact, use this book to look up a certain something and looked right past it. It literally had the exact term I was looking for and I couldn’t even see it. Searching a little online (in fact, asking after a solution I admitted that I couldn’t quite see) worked faster and with less stress.

I say no to this book, and now I’ve learned that this type of book just isn’t for me. I do suppose that if one wanted to be a “Ruby book collector” then there would be some value in it, but for me it appears that a resource must be functional in ways that a reference book is not.

I would see greater value in a semi-reference book which is more story-driven — tutorials, questions, descriptions — than with something which is almost entirely “dry”.

Lesson learned. The book has since been given away to a developer who could actually use it.