Tag Archives | books

"Learn code the hard way" is Zed Shaw's most awesome project to date

By on April 20, 2012 in books, general, literary, technical

Not a whole lot to say about it, but I think that the Learn Code The Hard Way ini­tia­tive is absolutely awe­some; it's prob­a­bly Zed Shaw's (@zedshaw) best work. I've used his Learn Python The Hard Way book (and snip­pets of Learn C The Hard Way, because some­times the Old Ways are the Best Ways) as ref­er­ence but they really excel when used lin­early to do what it says on the label.

This series uses example-based tuto­ri­als to explain and illus­trate con­cepts and new lessons build upon con­cepts learned from pre­vi­ous lessons and exam­ples. By the time you've gone through one of the books the most fun­da­men­tal lessons have been iter­ated over numer­ous times (but with­out beat­ing you over the head with them), and that's how these things stick. But hon­estly, my favorite things about these books are that they're priced to move (free & cheap, based on what for­mat you're look­ing for) and that they're open-source (the source code is up on Zed's Gito­ri­ous account) but they're edited; no wild-ass Wikipedia style mis­in­for­ma­tion, just peo­ple con­tribut­ing what they know where they think it'll do some good.

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Hey, here's another book I read recently: How to Count

By on April 1, 2012 in books, general

Steven Frank (@stevef), of Panic infamy has self-published the first vol­ume of an ambi­tious new series of tech­ni­cal books: How to Count: Pro­gram­ming for Mere Mor­tals, Vol­ume 1. It's a slim vol­ume, clock­ing in at approx­i­mately 70 pages (depend­ing on your e-reader of choice) but it's an excel­lent read on the fun­da­men­tal skill of think­ing about num­bers the way a com­puter thinks about num­bers. I will likely con­tinue to use the bits about con­vert­ing hex to binary long, long after I've for­got­ten every­thing else I read in here.

Long story short, it's inex­pen­sive ($2.99 e-book, $7.99 dead tree!), well writ­ten (as well writ­ten as the beloved Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby), and fun in a nerdy sort of "taught myself cal­cu­lus one sum­mer back in high school" sort of way. Did you teach your­self cal­cu­lus one sum­mer back in high school? If you did, this book is prob­a­bly beneath you. But since I spent my sum­mers in high school at the Warped Tour, work­ing dead-end food-service jobs, and swim­ming in creeks, I got a lot out of a sur­pris­ingly thin book.

If you're inter­ested in a gen­tle intro­duc­tion to pro­gram­ming, look­ing for a refresher on how com­put­ers do "The Maths", or just want to con­tribute a few dol­lars towards a noble cause (that is, con­vinc­ing Steve to write vol­ume 2) this is a worth­while pur­chase. Dou­ble word score bonus to the fact that unless we have a mas­sive quan­tum com­pute break­through within our life­times, the con­tents of this book should with­stand fac­tual atro­phy aston­ish­ingly well.

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Literary beta testing: Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby

By on March 21, 2012 in books, ruby

David Copeland (@davetron5000), author of GLI (Git-like Inter­face Com­mand Parser) has writ­ten a book called Build Awe­some Command-Line Appli­ca­tions in Ruby. I've been beta-testing the book while it was going through the pub­lish­ing process, and it is excel­lent. Of note: it focuses on writ­ing com­mand suites (like the rails com­mand or git) and stand-alone command-line appli­ca­tions (like rsync).

Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby

So like I men­tioned up there, I ini­tially grabbed the book around its sec­ond or third beta release, fig­ur­ing that while it was still in the process of becom­ing a Real Book I some­times feel like I'm still in the process of becom­ing a Real Admin so, you know, what the hell, let's work through it together.

I know a num­ber of devel­op­ers who only know Ruby in the con­text of the Rails frame­work (and maybe related Rake tasks) and this book is an excep­tional guide to using Ruby for more than just Rails appli­ca­tions. Command-line tool­ing has long been an area of inter­est for me as work­ing in oper­a­tions means often hav­ing to per­form a num­ber of repet­i­tive tasks which lend them­selves well to being scripted; good admins write good scripts. More stray obser­va­tions after the jump →.

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