Dave Howell
1/19/2006 11:22:00 PM
On Jan 19, 2006, at 8:07, Gennady Bystritsky wrote:
> But there're not THAT many ways to do something even in Ruby,
Have you been paying any attention to this maillist? Oh, my gosh. The
recent thread about counting unique elements in an array generated an
armload of possibilities, all different, for example. Some people will
do Regex magic, others use .inject or some tricky form of .each. One
person uses symbolic hashes, another adds a new method to the class.
I must agree; the Pickaxe book is a great reference but a lousy
tutorial. I don't *want* to learn the nine ways to iterate. I want to
learn one, so I can move on to other ideas. If I spend a lot of time
iterating, THEN I'll go read the later chapter on iterating and find
the shorter, quicker, less-typing way of doing it. But if I get them
all at once, I can't even figure out which one to use until I've
figured them all out, and to then discover that they're all the same
dang thing is just exasperating.
I don't need && and "and" because i already know how to use
parentheses, for example. The key lessons and important concepts are
lost in the noise of learning nine ways to do the same thing.
Well, I'm sure somebody's going to write the "Learn Ruby in 14 days"
book or the "Ruby for Dummies" book or something else, and the Pickaxe
book can just be The Reference Book.