Learn to Program is an excellent book for anyone who has an interest in learning to program. It is written for true beginners, who have little or no programming experience. Surprisingly enough, Pine magically manages to go from “What is an integer?” to full-blown object-oriented programming in less than 200 pages. Another bonus is that you will be learning Ruby, one of the newer, (in my opinion) sexier programming languages currently in circulation (i.e. COBOL=not sexy, Ruby=sexy). Decide for yourself:
“Hello World” Program Examples:
COBOL
-------------------------------------------------
000100 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
000200 PROGRAM-ID. HELLOWORLD.
000300
000400*
000500 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
000600 CONFIGURATION SECTION.
000700 SOURCE-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
000800 OBJECT-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
000900
001000 DATA DIVISION.
001100 FILE SECTION.
001200
100000 PROCEDURE DIVISION.
100100
100200 MAIN-LOGIC SECTION.
100300 BEGIN.
100400 DISPLAY " " LINE 1 POSITION 1 ERASE EOS.
100500 DISPLAY "Hello world!" LINE 15 POSITION 10.
100600 STOP RUN.
100700 MAIN-LOGIC-EXIT.
100800 EXIT.
Ruby
-------------------------------------------------
puts ‘Hello World!’
Learn to Program is thoroughly engaging and informative and manages to painlessly convey some pretty sophisticated programming concepts that can benefit both novice and more experienced programmers. If you want to learn to program or want a great introduction to Ruby, Learn to Program belongs on your bookshelf.
Edited: [GH]
Article comments
1 - Aaman
Your comparison of COBOL and Ruby is flawed. Try executing 20000 transactions a minute on an AS/400 with full transactional support using Ruby.
2 - Matt Largo
Hello Aaman,
My comparison of COBOL to Ruby is not flawed. I'm not comparing speed. I have run speed trials of COBOL against other languages and realize that COBOL kicks other languages' asses hands down 99.999% of the time. I am comparing COBOL and Ruby on the basis of lines of code to accomplish the same result. 20+ lines of COBOL versus 1 line of Ruby. Purely aesthetic. I realize that COBOL is still very vital in the IT world. Interestingly enough I live in a state that probably houses and runs the greatest number of lines of COBOL code in the U.S. I also realize that programming languages are like tools in your tool box. I would no more use Ruby for every programming need, than I would use a screwdriver for all of my remodeling needs.
FYI...I thought that I should correct a comment you made pertaining to a earlier comment of mine that caught my attention, but I didn't want to correct you at the time.
Believe it or not, you can count to two in binary. You will not see a decimal number '2' in the binary system, but computers have been counting to two (10) and beyond for years. Your comment about not being able to count to two, is like saying that we cannot count to '10' in decimal.
3 - Bliffle
Sounds like another poor language that will produce awkward unreliable programs in the hands of poor programmers recruited from other fields.
Why another superficial language? We already have enough. We're cursed with "C" (intrinsically flawed because of the authors ignorance of PLI Based Variables and the Fortran Pass-By-Reference problem which is easily solved with memory protection), which even in this day, with all the years of development, still has defective compiler implementations with inconsistent semantics for syntax constructs. There are plenty of other myopic languages that solve only the one problem that the naieve inventor is obsessed with and leaves undone the advances of 50 years of development since John Backus created the first Fortran on the IBM 650. It's easy to make any language look good compared to COBOL, but how does it stack up against REXX, which is an excellent scripting language?
We don't need more bad programmers unleashing bad sprawling programs on the world. Usually these messes get thrust upon some poor programmer to 'finish' with claims that it is 99% finished and just needs a tiny bit of work. In other words, we're not going to pay you much and we expect it to be done tomorrow.
4 - Matt Largo
Biffle,
I don't know much about REXX, but you make a good point. I can see where a lot of the new languages potentially fall in the hands of bad programmers only to gift everyone with substandard programs plagued with problems. I think that the main purpose of the book was to teach programming concepts with an open source language. I think the book serves this purpose well.