Why Ruby? Python would be a much better choice -- for that matter, C or assembly language [1] would be a better choice than Ruby! Here are the problems with R

Why Ruby? Python would be a much better choice -- for that matter, C or assembly language [1] would be a better choice than Ruby! Here are the problems with Ruby: - It is hard to get Ruby running on non-Linux systems. - Ruby programs are incredibly hard to understand because the Ruby language is not compact [2] - Rails is such a big part of the Ruby community, it is hard to find Ruby programs that aren't Rails webapps. So anyone who becomes interested in Ruby from the book, and searches online for more resources, will probably mostly get Rails-related hits. - These hits will not just be useless to a beginner, but intimidating and misleading. Web application programming is a poor area to direct beginners into, because even the most trivial web application requires understanding a dizzying array of complicated, interconnected ideas such networking, HTTP, URL's, databases, template processing, HTML, browsers... [1] I'm not trying to cast aspersions on anyone who started programming in these languages, and I'm not saying it's impossible to start there even today. I'm just saying that today there are much better choices available, such as Python. [2] http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch04s02.html http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch04s02.html