Ryan Bigg (github: https://github.com/radar) has been active in the Ruby community for years (and is seriously intelligent, at least based on his many past IRC responses to my Ruby questions, assuming he's also named Radar on there), has apparently been working with Elixir on the side for a while, and IMHO can definitely handle an Elixir book intended for new programmers. He would be a very significant asset to the community were he to jump ship and go fulltime Elixir.
Your skepticism (which is otherwise probably warranted) is quite wrong in this case. I'm sorry if someone defecated into your Cheerios this morning, though.
Sometimes the best way to learn is to teach, and sometimes the best way to teach is to make money teaching. :P
Yes that's me on both GitHub and Freenode IRC. I've been doing Elixir for roughly two years now. It's been fun.
I am not planning on jumping fulltime Elixir any time soon, because my company is currently doing a mixture of Ruby + Elixir. It's likely that I'll still straddle that particular divide for the foreseeable future :)
> (I'm well aware of what Ryan Bigg is and isn't, it's why I'm pointing this out)
So you're taking your personal issue with him, here. That's nice.
> There's no need for that.
Says the person who's quite frankly being a dick towards this guy without presenting any justification or evidence whatsoever, and I know for a personal fact that this guy has aided me on many occasions. I think you should check yourself before you wreck yourself any further, person. If you have a personal problem with him, take it up personally and not in a public forum. I have zero tolerance for evidence-less public humiliation, and so should all of you.
> IMHO someone which actually contributes high quality libraries or code to said community should be valued more
I think you're underestimating a number of things that are not visible on github yet can definitely have a positive effect on the community:
1) evangelizing a technology you believe in (something I've been known to do, on here and elsewhere)
2) organizers of meetings, confs and get-togethers
3) guys who help all the time on IRC and Slack in the relevant channels (something I've also been known to do, because I enjoy mentoring yet sort of abhor the spotlight)
4) book authors... has Dave Thomas been a big committer of elixir code? I don't think so, and yet his Programming Elixir book is considered one of the best
5) a lot of other stuff that is simply not very visible, such as Jose trying to make the community more inclusive
I googled Dave Thomas, and was not disappointed by the images of Dave Thomas of Wendy's fame with a description of the computer programmer and author underneath.
Hi. Nice to meet you. Clearly you know who I am, but I am not sure who you are. Care to inform me? Maybe we've met before. Commenting anonymously in a venemous way like this is surely below someone like you. Come out of the shadows and come and play with me. This'll be fun!
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The book is released for free, however I charge for the PDF because it takes time + energy to generate that (and typesetting, omg) _and_ it gives people a way to financially support the project (if they want to).
Joy of Elixir will _always_ be free because I think having the bar of entry as low as possible for newbie programmers is a nice thing to do. As I say on Joy of Elixir's about page, I want this book to be the equivalent to Learn to Program, but for Elixir. So in that same vein, it will always be free.
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Regarding my Elixir experience: I have been happily using it for two years "for fun" and one year in production _almost_ full-time. I have built several parts of my workplace's microservice's architecture using Elixir in a small team of Elixir developers. I've learned a crap load and made some frankly _awesome_ mistakes.
In the last four months I've started mentoring a junior developer in the ways of Elixir and that's what led me down this path of writing a book directed at newbie developers.
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Brown-nosing on IRC? Hardly. I've been active on Freenode #rubyonrails for at least 10 years and #elixir-lang on-and-off for at least the past 2.
> IMHO someone which actually contributes high quality libraries or code to said community should be valued more, yet these are usually the last people you would ever see slapping their name on a book. They are happy to just improve the existing documentation and contribute that way.
I wrote https://github.com/radar/elastic. Sorry if this is not up to your high-quality bar. Patches welcome. Open source is great, yeah?
And by the way: I am strongly (so strongly) in the camp of documentation being more important than the code itself. For without documentation, who can understand how to use the code? Who can understand the _reasons_ behind the code?
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> This is all just A self promotional stunts. The author has done this before in the Rails community.
I started contributing documentation fixes / entire guides to the Rails community in 2008. I started using Rails in 2004. I felt it was one of the best ways that I could possibly give back to the community that has kept me very, very safely employed since 2006. 543 commits to Rails, at least: http://contributors.rubyonrails.org/contributors/ryan-bigg/c.... All for free.
In terms of self-promotional work, I spent at least two years of my free time writing books. Probably closer to three, but let's not brag too much. And yes, I _do_ use the books I wrote for self-promotion. It would be pretty ridiculous to spend all that time writing a book, selling it and then _not_ using them for self-promotion, dontyathink? I use them as more of an example of what I am capable of teaching people, more than "hey, look at how STUPENDOUSLY AMAZING I AM". Although, I admit, sometimes I act that way too.
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Anyway, it's been nice rebuffing your attacks today. I'm very happy to continue to play this game for as long as you wish. I guarantee you I have more patience.
And I implore you again: come out from the shadows, little troll.
The author has been hanging around the community for the past few months, if they wanted to make it a better place, they should work on improving the already amazing documentation. This is all just A self promotional stunts. The author has done this before in the Rails community
I'm not familiar with the author, but writing a programming book has got to have the worst possible effort to return value ratio if one's goal is solely self-promotion. I'm disinclined to believe anyone would put in that kind of time if that's what they were going for.
