Al Hoang

I just noticed that The Ruby Programming Language Book by David Flanagan is out on Safari now. This looks like an update to Ruby in a Nutshell which has been a rather disappointing title for me personally.

After a glance through the contents of this updated edition it looks like this one could be a real winner on hand for Ruby programmers wanting a organized and clean description of some of the deeper parts of Ruby without having to trawl through piles of blog posts or read through piles of source code just to get an explanation. While there is much to be said from learning through reading source code. Good explanations of concepts and code are something to be valued. Let’s hope this title really is what I think it is. Either way, I can’t possibly make a thorough judgement call on a book I’ve not really read through. So take my thoughts on the book with a grain of salt. I only spent 20 minutes glancing through the contents and skimming some sections to see if it had the type of content I would be interested in.

On a side note it seems that the author rebukes a blogger denigrating the book before it’s even out yet. He also brings up the Ruby Fanboy / Club phenomenon that supposedly has been on the rise in the Ruby community. I guess popularity brings the ‘Club’ in no matter how hard you try to fend it off.

Avery Pennaru posted a blog entry on git is the next UNIX where he hypothesizes that:

git is a totally new way to operate on data… Git was originally not a version control system; it was designed to be the infrastructure so that someone else could build one on top… Git is a platform… Much like Unix itself, git’s actual software doesn’t matter; it’s the file format, the concepts, that change everything.

So the underlying ideas are what makes git very powerful. Interesting thoughts. I’ve played around with using git but I still can’t see it past a version control system at the moment. A VCS that still has very weak Windows support which is a serious problem for getting a TEAM of people to actually use the system. But I see that Windows support slowly moves forward.

Anyways, I want to believe the hype in git but show me some real-world examples instead of pie in the sky thoughts, please?