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I agree. I think this book and a lot of others fall into the _why's Poignant Guide to Ruby which i still totally don't understand the appeal of if you already

I agree. I think this book and a lot of others fall into the _why's Poignant Guide to Ruby which i still totally don't understand the appeal of if you already know how to program. I mean, _why is an interesting dude, who did a lot of interesting things, but (1) the whole 'chunky bacon' thing just is not my cup of bacon smoothie and (2) it was not really a great book for people who already know a lot about programming. More broadly, I feel like _why's Poignant Guide to Ruby is an example of what I call John Bonhamization. John Bonham plays drums in Led Zeppelin. His whole style is crazy: rope-a-dope with the beat, playing mostly with the singer, playing "lead drums" and it's awesome! It's so good! It really, really works in the context of Led Zeppelin because John Bonham was a freak of nature and it just went along with their band in a magical way. But it works for almost no one else ever. It's exactly the wrong thing to copy. It's like when people in Silicon Valley are like "well, Steve Jobs was rude as shit, I'LL be rude as shit and then *I'LL invent the next iPod!!" And then you have generation after generation of people trying to copy someone else's magic and not hitting it, when they'd've been better served trying to do the normal thing and, maybe, if they were lucky, finding their own magic. I also think there's a bigger problem with people not writing books for people who know about programming. Odds are, if you are reading a book about a programming language, you already know a fuck ton about programming languages, but most programming language books fall into one of two categories: - Books that try to teach programming via the language in question. - Books about advanced techniques or exhaustive library documentation, cookbooks, etc. for people who already know the language. The overwhelmingly most common case of someone reading a PL book (for a language that's not one of the world's ten most popular) is "I know a dozen other programming languages but don't know this one." Only fairly advanced programmers even bother reading books about Clojure, or D, or Rust, or Dylan, or Self, or Racket, or Julia... Personally, I really like the Joy of Clojure. If I had to compare it to another PL book tough it would be the Matz Ruby book, not Crockford. It's pretty good though.

luck_fenovo 10y ago
Clojure for the Brave and True is, in my opinion, more substantial than _why's Poignant Guide. It moves faster, guides you through some real (if small) projects, and the whimsical tone is really just some flavoring rather than the whole focus of the book. _why's guide really seems only to be incidentally about programming in Ruby because it's focus is being some kind of crazy postmodern deconstruction of programming tutorials, while Clojure for the Brave and True is the inverse, if that makes sense. I think it's a good introduction, and as someone who's programmed in a lot of languages over the years it was accessible without being too dumbed-down. The style certainly isn't to everyone's taste, of course.

luck_fenovo 10y ago

Clojure for the Brave and True is, in my opinion, more substantial than _why's Poignant Guide. It moves faster, guides you through some real (if small) projects, and the whimsical tone is really just some flavoring rather than the whole focus of the book. _why's guide really seems only to be incidentally about programming in Ruby because it's focus is being some kind of crazy postmodern deconstruction of programming tutorials, while Clojure for the Brave and True is the inverse, if that makes sense. I think it's a good introduction, and as someone who's programmed in a lot of languages over the years it was accessible without being too dumbed-down. The style certainly isn't to everyone's taste, of course.