

Zed Shaw, LPTHW, & Learn You An Ruby - krainboltgreene
http://krainboltgreene.github.com/l/10/

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krainboltgreene
Heavily considering the name change: Learn You __The __Ruby For Awesome Power.

EDIT: Ok, slowly moving over. Time to rewrite history! Future GooglAzon.com
users will be like " _What Ye Mystery Doth This?! YouErEls point to Learn You
An Ruby, but Thine Project Was Called-eth Learn You The Ruby!_ " And no one
will ever understand why, because Hacker News will be like Slashdot and no one
will visit it except to make ironic references to "hacker newsing a site",
because MyFacespora Newsddit will be where all the cool startup guys hang out.

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wwortiz
For some reason that "An" irks me way more than it should.

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krainboltgreene
Trust me, I feel like that much more of a dweeb when I tell people out loud.

"I'm writing a book, Learn You...(whisper)an ruby(whisper)...For awesome
Power"

~~~
wwortiz
Well I dare say why not keep going with the trend and have it something like
Learn you the Ruby for great good! (At least that hurts a bit less :))

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krainboltgreene
Oh man! Shucks. "The" would have been so much better :/

I need an INTERNET search and replace.

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rquirk
Just change it now, the internet will catch up. The sooner you do it, the
better. Obviously only do it if you really want to change the title.

(FWIW I don't really like the "an" either, sorry!)

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philwelch
I like how why's (poignant) guide to Ruby kicked off the trend for quirky
programming language books, and now we're back to writing quirky programming
language books for Ruby. (Though the poignant guide may have been a little
_too_ quirky.)

~~~
jamesbritt
Didn't care for Mr Bunny?

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mechanical_fish
Did Mr. Bunny ever appear in anything but his guide to ActiveX? I can
understand why someone might not have heard of ActiveX.

Anyone old enough to grow up in the era of early PCs remembers quirky
programming books. I learned Pascal from the Sherlock Holmes-themed Pascal
book back in the day. Though, admittedly, Mr. Bunny and the cartoon foxes are
an order of magnitude quirkier.

~~~
tjr
Mr. Bunny also appeared in _Mr. Bunny's Big Cup o' Java_ , which featured a
full-page image of a semicolon, one of the more important characters used in
Java code.

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jarin
Just wanted to pipe in and say that as Martin's former boss (before he went to
Engine Yard) I think this whole Internet firestorm is hilarious. I always knew
he'd make me proud :)

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SAHChandler
The Learn You A Haskell, and Learn You Some Erlang links both point to Learn
You Some Erlang. Some folks may become confused. :)

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sjs
I see no problem there.

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jeroen
It's been fixed. See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1877829>

~~~
sjs
Was just a failed attempt at humour.

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oedipa
As a writer AND a programmer, I applaud the creativity people are bringing to
writing about Language. And I mean language in the programming sense. Ruby is
obviously exciting many people out there and it's great to see the creativity
didn't stop with _why's book. Perhaps it's just beginning.

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jrockway
Quick question about Learn You A * books -- has anyone here ever started from
0, read one, and then started writing useful software?

~~~
steveklabnik
LYAH really helped cement some of my Haskell knowledge; I'm at that middle
sort of zone where I knew basic stuff, but some of the more advanced things
don't make sense to me yet. The Applicative, Monad, and Zippers parts in
particular have helped me a lot.

~~~
jrockway
What sorts of programming problems have you solved with Applicative, Monad,
and Zippers so far?

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steveklabnik
I'm not actually doing anything useful with Haskell. It's purely an
intellectual plaything with me.

That said, I've used Applicative when playing around with parsing, and
Monads... all the time. Though mostly just IO, Maybe, Writer, and State,
nothing crazy.

I'm still getting comfortable with Zippers, so I have yet to even toy around
with them. But the LYAH description was much easier than any of the other
(small amounts) of reading I've done on the subject.

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crazydiamond
> First, this assumes you've got a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04 (But any
> version around that should work).

Do we really need to be so specific to learn ruby ?

~~~
krainboltgreene
Getting Ruby up and running is different for every major OS out there.

Quite frankly I don't have the resources to document how to do it on the Mac.

Windows is...well I don't know, just a few months ago it was almost non-
existent, now I hear it's not to bad?

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bhiggins
these "Learn You..." (NB: this does not include LPTHW) books seem like a post-
modern version of the "For Dummies" series. So, if you enjoyed the vapid "For
Dummies"-style jokes but wanted more non-sequiturs, these are the books for
you.

~~~
mononcqc
I am currently writing Learn You Some Erlang. I have never read one of the
'For Dummies' book, have no idea what tone they employ or what kind of readers
they assume they have.

I can say, however, that there already exist a few books on Erlang, quite
serious, that actually cost money. I wanted to offer a free resource to learn
Erlang, given my frustration at the lack such things when I began learning the
language myself. I found a problem, and am currently trying my best to solve
it.

If you feel like learning the language but my book's style and/or tone annoys
you, you might prefer buying one of the books. There's also an online tutorial
on erlang.org and an interactive one on tryerlang.org.

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pjscott
Your book is amazing. I've been trying to learn erlang, and you were the first
person I've come across who really explains things well. I just wanted to
thank you, and encourage you to keep on writing.

A link, for anybody who's curious:

<http://learnyousomeerlang.com/content>

