Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide, Second Edition
by Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler, Andy Hunt
Pragmatic Bookshelf
Ruby is one language I've always been curious about. Reading the tutorials has always been a breeze, the language is almost readable for your average human being, and I've always been impressed by the developer community- active and enthusiastic- that surrounds it.
I want to be part of that, is what I think to myself.
So, when the 2nd edition of the justifiably-famous Pickaxe book came up for review, I jumped at it. Weighing in at 800-odd pages, the author, Dave Thomas, has added around 50% or more to his previous edition. Mr. Thomas, if you don't know of him, has been an author for programming books for some time, the earliest example of which I'd found being a style guide for Smalltalk.
Excited to get going, I downloaded the latest Windows installer for Ruby. This latest release contains, in addition to the core binaries themselves, the excellent SciTE editor, Freeride [an IDE] and several libraries.
The installer completed its work, and I fired Freeride up.
Nothing. Or next to it.
What I got was a console, stating the path was wrong or didn't exist. Now, this was an odd thing, because I'd had an earlier release of Ruby [possibly 1.6] installed with the same OS, albeit on another hard drive, which worked. Scratching my head, I wondered what might possibly have changed and whether I'd the foresight to have kept it on disk somewhere. I hadn't.
Nothing for it then, I figured. After submitting a couple of bug reports, I considered what to do. I know, I thought, I'll simply install it on my Debian partition and that will be that.
Oh, my Lord.
The entire point of having a Linux installed upon your desktop is to have a system that can be customized to your liking. To promote choice and have the power to do things. More than some Linux advocates, the Debian folks believe that in spades.
Article comments
1 - Chad Fowler
A correction and a question:
Dave Thomas, of the Pragmatic Programmers, is not the Dave Thomas that contributed to the Smalltalk book you reference here.
Wrt Gems, what happened when you tried to use it? It should be extremely easy with the latest Windows installer, since RubyGems comes with it. Please don't hesitate to contact me directly for help on RubyGems.
Chad Fowler
2 - urthshu
Thank you kindly for the correction, Mr. Fowler.
WRT Gems, and the installation in general, it appears the paths were broken and so wouldn't work at all.
Since I went to the trouble to download Mondrian at their site, I took an opportunity to experiment with it. Apparently the .lnk files were fussy about double vs. single quotes on my Win98se platform, and this was repeated throughout the install.
I suspect, though cannot confirm, that this niggling detail is part of the issue. Other than this, I confess to being at a loss.
3 - Aaman
The book is available online at Rubycentral
4 - Aaman
I was able to easily get Ruby working from the link in your article - I am using the pretty nice FreeRIDE - the only manual step I had to do was add my root Ruby directory (d:ruby) to the Path variable from the Control Panel - only D:rubybin was added by the install.
Easy and interesting language - still exploring the shores - my favorite for a while has been C# - mainly because of the clean construction and flexibility.