Book Note: Teach Yourself Ruby in 21 Days

I'm ready to give up on this one. As I expected, he dropped the pretense of writing for both novice and experienced programmers by the fifth chapter and is now in full-blown programmerspeak. That's fine with me, because I'd rather read something that assumes I know how to program, but doesn't assume I know Ruby. What is more frustrating is that he resisted explaining the OO features of Ruby early on, so now he is forced to introduce them as needed throughout unrelated chapters. For example, he explained how to create and use class methods as opposed to object methods in chapter six, which was supposed to be about I/O. He had no choice, because the File class has some methods that are used before a file object is created. Another problem I have is his use of examples. I believe in using either ultra simple examples, such as X = 1 and Y = 2, or useful examples that explain how a language feature can be applied in a practical way. This author is trying to stay somewhere in the middle by using examples that have real looking data but don't actually do anything useful. I'm not sure who would benefit from his approach. My next Ruby book will be Hal Fulton's The Ruby Way.