Russ

PS – If Dan keeps saying nice things like that, I guess I will have to write another book.

The Design Patterns in Ruby is great, at least for someone coming from Java. I hope Russ Olsen writes some more books.

To be honest I’d forgotten that the “tutorial” was so diffuse. It looks like the first *part* of the book is considered to be the tutorial, which gets us to page 173!

@Ken: I’m certainly not saying that I’d be able to write a decent book on ruby. That is in no way implied by what I wrote above. But when everyone else is fawning over a book/author a little balance isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As above, (I’m a migratory beast, moving from Perl), when I saw reviews stating that the pickaxe was as good as, or even *better* than “Programming Perl” I ordered it immediately. Sadly it’s not even in the same ballpark.

So I suppose what I’m trying to get across here is that by no means is the pickaxe a *bad* book, it’s just not the great book that I have consistently been told it is. Others evidently have similar views.

You said: I don’t think a lot of people had their negative feelings bottled up or something for so long, only to unleash them when a high-profile name came out and said it first.

Actually, that’s precisely true in my case. As I have both a competing book, and the most popular weblog in the Ruby sector, it was a politically correct decision for me not to bash the Pickaxe, but I did so after Zed’s outburst simply because a big outburst is a good way to seep out true opinions in the backchannel

The Pickaxe is to be applauded for being still the only true Ruby “reference” book, but it’s still not a particularly good book overall and acted as a major motivation for mine as the Pickaxe is next to useless for beginners.

@Karmen – I don’t know much Java, so I honestly wouldn’t know where this would apply. Maybe there’s some truth to this, since the Pragmatic Programmers released a book later on called Rails for Java Developers, so maybe Dave was gearing towards the Java audience.

@pjm – Which tutorial are you talking about? if you’re referring to the Karaoke Jukebox machine Zed mentioned in his rant, then I would agree with you in that part. But that’s just a segment of the book, not everything. I don’t think there’s a “perfect” programming book for any language, which is why I suggested reading more than one book on any given subject, to compensate missing language features from one book to another.

@Doug Bromley – As others have pointed out, Ruby was virtually non-existent in the minds of programmers in the U.S. before Pickaxe. There are a lot of folks who learned a lot from this book (as shown by my E-Mail to DHH). And popularity doesn’t equal quality or greatness at any level, but I doubt the “masses” are “idiotic”. Well, not all of them, at least. In no form I’m treating him as a saint. Can you blame him for getting into an untapped market to make money? I would’ve done the exact same thing. It’s no coincidence Ruby experienced an increase in usage ever since his book came out.

@AkitaOnRails – Interesting that you’ve written a book. I know that it’s not easy, especially for a virtual foreign programming language. I wasn’t trying to be apologetic either. I’m just trying to point out that the Pickaxe book isn’t the piece of garbage everyone’s making it out to be recently.

@Robert – If you base your opinion on the book thanks to that particular segment, I don’t think you’re looking at the full picture. Like I’ve stated already, that segment was confusing, to say the least. The rest of the book was pretty solid, in my opinion. After I read Pickaxe, I went on to other Ruby books. But that didn’t take away the fact that most of my Ruby learnings were thanks the Pickaxe book. I’m glad you went on to other books, though, and didn’t shelf the language just because you didn’t like one book on the subject.

@Ken – I’m glad you agree with my points. I didn’t write this post to defend Dave. I just wanted to give my opinion on the book, because I think it’s a good base to learn Ruby. Of course, it’s my opinion, and as you can see, a lot of people have their own.

@an idiot – I’m guessing that’s not your real name… I’m not sure what your opinions are, but thanks for stopping by, I guess.

Treating Dave Thomas like a saint is ridiculous. He’s a businessman who saw an opportunity to release an English-language book on a subject he believed would take off.

Even his making of the first edition free was nothing more than a marketing tool to explode the uptake of Ruby and therefore increase sales of the second edition.

And you’re calling Rails developers elitists?

Weren’t you defeated at Waterloo?