With Special Guests: David A. Black and Joseph Leo IIIEpisode SummaryDavid A. Black has been a Ruby user for 19 years and has been writing books about Ruby for the last 14 years. Joseph spent 12 years in software and started the company Def Method Inc. Together, they co-authored the book The Well-Grounded Rubyist, which will soon have its third edition released. They give some of the history behind The Well-Grounded Rubyist. Joseph talks about his experience being brought into the project. David and Joseph talk about how The Well-Grounded Rubyist is different from other books on Ruby. This book is helpful because a lot of people begin by understanding Ruby more than Rails, and this book talks about ways to think about Ruby and understand how it’s structure. Joseph and David talk about how The Well-Grounded Rubyist 3rd edition differs from the 2nd edition. The book has been updated so that a lot of the code and solutions for the exercises are available online and there is an additional chapter in part 3 about Ruby dynamics and how one would write functional programming with RubyThe panel discusses how important it is to learn Ruby before starting a job in Rails 2. They agree that if you are a Ruby developer, even if you’re working on Rails apps, so you should know your tools. They discuss how far down that road The Well Grounded Rubyist would get readers. They panelists talk about other books that are a natural prequel or sequel to the The Well-Grounded Rubyist. Joseph and David talk about their approach to reading books and how The Well-Grounded Rubyist should be read. Their goal in making the book was not to have people work on an overarching application while reading the book, but rather there are exercises and examples that you are encouraged to work through. There are some lessons in the book that you won’t write often, but you still need to know how to do it. While the book doesn’t have everything about Ruby, but the examples are designed to give you the best returns for you study. David and Joseph conclude by giving their final thoughts on the book.Links
