Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

A Little Ruby, A Lot of Objects

Brian Marick started a book on objects in Ruby five years ago called A Little Ruby, A Lot of Objects [PDFs here]. Its written in the unique style the The Little Schemer and A Little Java, A Few Patterns. You could go as far as to call these books the Socratic method applied to learning programming.

Unfortunately, Brian only made it to chapter three, but the few chapters he did write are well worth reading. They really cleared up some my misconceptions about the object system in Ruby (though I still need to work thru the third chapter where everything goes crazy at the end). Recommended.

Surely if you can name three books written in this particular style, it’s not unique? :)

Hah. Well compared the legion of programming books written in the traditional, chapter-per-api structure, yeah they are pretty unique. The books I linked to all authored by Dan Friedman (http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dfried/), who seems to be the originator of the style.

More Thoughts on Ruby and Why it isn’t enterprise

I previously blogged on Large Enterprises and why they don’t care about Ruby and was rightfully accused of bashing folks in the Ruby community but not providing the answer to my original statement. Figured I would set things right…