Book Report: Head First Ruby
Part of my commitment to The Ruby Rogues show and as a part of my personal Tsundoku challenge is to either read or finish reading literature about Ruby, which is freaking awesome, as it makes me a better Ruby developer and a better teacher. The book I just just finished actually fits perfectly in both as although we will be interviewing the author soon, I have had the book for almost a year and never made it past the first chapter (Life). So without further ado, lets begin.
I personally rate this book as Advanced Novice, meaning that you either need to have experience in programming but not particularly in Ruby, or at least have finished another beginner Ruby Book and using this as a skill reinforcement tool or to expand a relatively new toolbox. Its a great book to read if you’ve just completed Learn Ruby The Hard Way but may not be for you if you’ve finished the PickAxe already. Its a good book for new grads of both coding bootcamps as well as college grads who want to pick up some OOP experience.
One of first things that you notice about this book is that it goes in-depth about the how it is written and tries to enforce good learning habits using science. As a military guy waiting until the end of the day to learn something new didn’t sit well with me, but it makes a ton of sense and the fact about hydration is very true. I like how it uses a lot of images as well multiple ways to teach the same information to you, but to some that could be annoying, but repetition is how you learn code.
It does do the one thing that I always hear students complain about, but I feel that it does it late enough in the book where its ok and that is it gets really hefty the last two technical chapters of the book compared to the rest of it. I feel that the chapters on testing and Sinatra could have both been two chapters a piece instead of attempting to shove each into one chapter of each subject, particularly testing, which is very important in today’s skill set and frankly, rarely written about until you are looking for specialty books on the subject.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book, specifically the point of view it was written from. As we are trying to make code the new math, more books should come from the point of view of a normal person that simply wants to build stuff and not from the point of view of a Computer Science graduate. Its one of the few books on Ruby that I have read that seems to encompass Matz’s belief that Ruby should be happy and not focused on the ego of the author’s knowledge. For that I rate this book four out of five stars and recommend it to any new coders who have just finished another beginning ruby book or maybe 20 minutes with Ruby tutorial.
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