2010
If you are interested in Ruby, or already a Ruby programmer, you might be interested in a wee little precious gem called Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby, written by why the lucky stiff. It is not only a mindboggling trip into the depths of the language – it has cartoon foxes, it has a mad genius misunderstood by the world, why, it even comes with its own soundtrack!
Before going all the way and building my own hip holster, I needed to print the book and so, feeling uncomfortable with the HTML PDF version, I made a LaTeX-powered PDF out of it, and here it is: Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby (9.8 MiB). Update: Thanks to Alexandre Gravier who made a great contribution by improving the PDF in many ways. Alexandre also set up a GitHub repository.
For a comfortable always-carrying-the-book-around-everywhere-you-go experience, the PDF has a weird paper size of 6.8″ x 8.8″. Copy shops should be able able to cut 100+ pages to a custom size. Otherwise, feel free to scale the printout accordingly.
What’s not in the PDF:
The Tiger’s Vest expansion pack- The sidebars, as I felt that they would disrupt the reading flow.
This is an archive of various things I have done or I am currently working on,
and I'm publishing this in case somebody working on the same things might find something useful.
Hi,
this is some great work. I really appreciate it, but what’s with these strange g’s around the code samples? (see http://j.mp/dhp06R) I assume there’s been some unicode messup or alike.
Thanks for pointing this out! You were right, it was a unicode mess up. It’s fixed now and unless your browser doesn’t try to give you a cached version, things should be fine now.
Thanks for the gem …
An interesting talk comparing ruby and python …
Python vs. Ruby: A Battle to The Death
http://vimeo.com/9471538
A lecture of the freelance professor himself …
http://www.vimeo.com/5047563
Excellent work, Michael.
Hi, Michael
Guided here from wikipedia.
I noticed there are mistakes in your pdf where ‘ are converted to ’. I mean, the marks used for indicating a string are mis-converted to the marks used in phrase “I’m”.
That’s really a pity, anyway thanks for your work.
Hey yumeyao,
thanks for pointing this out – I can fix most things and update the PDF regularly. However, I am not sure what you mean. I use ’ and ” to denote strings in the source code where it is monospaced, and in the normal paragraph text, I use typographic quotation marks. Could you tell me which page you are talking about?
Thanks,
Michael.
Just a little simple example:
On page 15, you’ve got to seen the following piece:
[’toast’, ’cheese’, ’wine’].each { |food| print food.capitalize }
Try running it inside ruby. It’s blocked by the ‘ mark.
It should be ‘, not ’
Well damn the ‘ mark is always auto-converted by your blog system. You should try out it yourself.
Hey yumeyao,
I fixed the issue – thanks for pointing it out, I have never tried to copypaste the code into an irb before! The updated PDF is online.
Ahoy,
Micha.
hi Michael and friends. I’m new to Ruby, new to oop, trying to learn Ruby on my own. I ordered a beginner’s book but UPS lost it. Should I just learn online with Books similar to Why’s Poignant….? It keeps popping up. Is it meant for a beginner to programming?
thanks for your help — John
Hi John,
yes it is, yes you should!
Micha.
thanks M. so far it’s a blast.
Thanks, good work, it works for my kindle, but unfortunately the device couldn’t show the meaning for the words like other formats of PDF. Is there a way to change the PDF format from your file or even create a .mobi file?
I found a way, and it works perfect.
joseareland: any chance you could share the mobi or how you converted it?
Thanks!
Could this be updated with Chapter 8 and The Tiger’s Vest expansion pack?
anon: Luckily, somebody already did this and I have updated the PDF link accordingly. The PDF now also contains the expansion pack.
However, as far as I know, chapter 8 was never finished. What a drama. It’s like a cliffhanger at the end of an episode and then production gets cancelled in the middle of the season.
Thanks a lot for this great PDF version!
But don’t you think the sidebars are needed so it is a “complete” version? I didn’t read anything of the book yet, just wanted to hear a bit more from your opinion about this.
I’m just sending the link to the PDF to a friend who’s working in a copy show… Yaayyyy, this will be a lot of fun!
Yeah, you’re right. I just didn’t like the starmonkey sidebar at all. Feel free to add the sidebars if you wish, it’s on GitHub: https://github.com/agravier/wpgtr-latex
nice job, I am loving it.