by by Mark Slagell · Nov 2014

Teach yourself Ruby in 21 days

This is a very nice, slick, little book with a fair amount of background in Ruby to actually remind/teach one how to work with this language.

Chapter subdivision is done surprisingly well. I assume that if you’ve programmed in the other scripting languages such as Perl of Python, you should be able to squeeze book’s ``Day’’ in a corporate’s date.

Otherwise: the measurement is probably pretty accurate.

The exercises are interesting, unlike in some other books. Doing the exercises made me feel like I’m actually accomplishing something practical, and not yet another:

def Animal
	...
end

def Dog < Animal
	...
end

Some minor things which I found inconvenient:

• Author defined “args”, but didn’t really explain variable-sized arrays

• One of the examples earlier in a book used “&block”, which was actually explained later in a chapter.

• Day 11 exercise 3 (answer) was very confusing at the first glance. Basically for a larger amount of time I couldn’t figure out what:

  push 1

  does and how it’s possible. Quiz: you try to figure it out.