For me, this is one of those quintessential software books. Reading it takes me back to 2005, when I was in college — not studying CS but still building for the web as I have been since I was 13 — and feeling so seen to see a book/collection of essays/language introduction written in an original and irreverent style much more akin to Dave Eggers than anything else of the genre.
I never really embraced Ruby — though I always admired it and adopted TextMate like all the other cool kids — but this and _why’s other work stuck with me as sticks with me now.
I've tried Ruby (and RoR, which, while I've never used it professionally, has had a huge impact on the whole realm of web application development that I'm into), but I never fully understood it. Made a first RoR app from a book, but when trying to deploy it I ran into a minor issue (probably wrong database configuration), apparently I had to restart the application but the webhoster I used did not give access to restart the thing so I just sighed, gave up, and went back to PHP.
I never really embraced Ruby — though I always admired it and adopted TextMate like all the other cool kids — but this and _why’s other work stuck with me as sticks with me now.