I’ve been
in the habit (well I’ve usually not had a choice) of learning a new language
each year or so. I’ve always had an
interest in scripting languages, this is not unusual as I started my
programming life as a system administrator and I used VB scripting edition for
all kinds of things. I’ve since learned
quite a few languages and some I’ve enjoyed and some I have not. I looked into PERL last year as it is used
where I work and I had read about it in The
Pragmatic Programmer. I was a little
bit disappointed. What a mess. It seemed like a patched together hack and I
was not much more productive then if I had simply used Java or C#. With that out of the way, I was surprised to
see a book published on-line by the authors of The Pragmatic Programmer.
Programming Ruby is a
book dedicated to the Ruby language.
Ruby is supposed to be simple to use and very object-oriented. I have decided that this is the next language
I will dive into. One reason I am
interested is the productivity promised by the Ruby on Rails framework.
Here is a
list of what I am expecting:
- Easy
to learn
- Easy
to use
- Minimal
hassle
- Minimal
quirks
- Free
to use
- Good
for web developing
Some things that I am interested in finding out:
- Data
Access capabilities
- Availability
of editors (code completion, etc)
I will post again once I have read the book and coded enough
to form an opinion of Ruby.