Life in Balance: Amit D. Chaudhary’s Blog
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I recently read Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby by Why the Lucky Stiff in my quest to learn Ruby and Rails.

These are some notes or a mini review , if you are planning to learn Ruby.

Why’s Guide is a quirky online mini book on Ruby with a fictional story and cartoons running with the guide and I cannot recommend it enough. You will have fun and some laughter along the way, as a matter of fact, learning rarely felt this good.

However I should warn as the chapters progress and the serial killer appears, the guide spawns multiple genres from Comedy to Black Comedy to Macabre Thrillers. The characters include among others the foxes, the elf and the ham and the serial killer and space traveler Dr. Cham. Also, I did find myself skipping some sections when I felt a need for urgency to get to the Ruby part of the chapter.

On the technical aspect, the guide covers basic syntax, objects, builtin data structures, file IO, user input, developer tools such as the interactive ruby (irb) and ruby man pages (ri) and advanced ruby features like ‘method missing’, modules and mixin, inspect, etc.

Here are some cartoons and snippets from Why’s Guide to Ruby to give you an idea:

Brain health.

Vitamin R. Goes straight to the head. Ruby will teach you to express your ideas through a computer. You will be writing stories for a machine. The language will become a tool for you to better connect your mind to the world.

We start off the book by getting along well in the Introduction. This togetherness, this synergy, propels us through the book, with me guiding you on your way.

So you’ve got to know that synergy doesn’t actually mean synergy in this book. I can’t do normal synergy. No, in this book, synergy means cartoon foxes. What I’m saying is: this book will be starting off with an exorbitant amount of cartoon foxes.

And I will be counting on you to turn them into synergy

…

I’m proud of you. Anyone will tell you how much I brag about you. How I go on and on about this great anonymous person out there who scrolls and reads and scrolls and reads. “These kids,” I tell them. “Man, these kids got heart. I never…”

And my heart glows bright red under my filmy, translucent skin and they have to administer 10cc of JavaScript to get me to come back. (I respond well to toxins in the blood.) Man, that stuff will kick the peaches right out your gills!