e enjte janar 27, 2005

Like all java geeks I've been learning Ruby recently: it's always refreshing to learn new ways of thinking about things. In Ruby the main way to think about programming is in terms of iterators and blocks.

A few references for my friend Erwan:

• Programming Ruby aka the Pickaxe, by our friends the pragmatic programmers. Dense, terse, fun, as all their books. It's the classic for Ruby. I had a similar pleasure reading it as when I read Programming Perl many years ago (except that I never finished Programming Perl, and very quickly did not have any occasion anymore to practice what I had learnt). Start with the Pickaxe.
• Ruby homepage: the Ruby official homepage, Ruby Application Archive, to search for Gems, and RubyForge listing Ruby projects.
• Rolling with Ruby on Rails at O'Reilly, by Curt Hibbs, from last week: a very windowish tutorial (pages of screenshots to explain what would be done with a few commandlines on a Unix system) but it explains very clearly the basics of the Rails Ruby webapp MVC framework (I guess O'Reilly's target audience is changing these days:-).
• JRuby: a ruby interpreter in java. Get the best of both worlds, Ruby for the higher level logic, and all the power of your favorite java libraries. Or embed Ruby in your favorite app server. They released a 0.8 version 4 days ago, with full support for Ruby 1.8.x grammar.
• Thanks to James Britt for pointing out in a comment the very good rubydoc weblog, a blog about new Ruby documentation.

I have a few pet project ideas that I want to do in Ruby: let's see how pleasurable it is to code with!

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