This incredible… thing is rolling off my printer, double-sided, at 12 pages/minute. Those who know me know how much I loathe printouts. But I’m making an exception.
Recently feeling like it’s time to offer the Rails development framework to hosting customers*. But it’s hard to do that until and unless I’ve at least dipped a toe into Ruby’s lean, sparkling waters. Stumbled on the Poignant guide and was immediately amazed. It’s got hand-drawn cats. It’s got surrealistic dialog. It’s got punk-rock collaged narratives floating in the sidebars. It’s got photos of car keys sticking out of apples perched on coffee mugs. It’s got clean, well-written, entertaining prose on learning Ruby. This is the rare tech book that doesn’t answer to corporate masters, that exhibits the full, unfettered creativity of a literate, funky programmer unbound by editorial constraint or preconceived notions of how a tech book should look, or work.
Not that I suddenly have time to master Ruby, but I am going to bed with this 126-page PDF right now.
* Actually I’ve already got the Ruby interpreter installed, as well as mod_ruby and FastCGI, just need to do some integration tests, and figure out the best way to offer this to customers in a reliable, consistent way. It’s such a different animal from Perl/PHP/Python, etc. Need to wrap my head around it just a bit before unleashing the hounds.
As you know, I’m a Ruby lover. Welcome aboard, enjoy the ride.