Customer Reviews

Learn to Program (Pragmatic Programmers)

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

As a relative newcomer to Ruby, one of the first things that struck me was the overall simplicity and clarity of the language. I couldn't help thinking that Ruby could serve as an excellent language to teach programming fundamentals. Chris Pine's "Learning to Program" tackles that very task. The latest title in the Pragmatic Programmers Facets of Ruby series, "Learn to Program" arms the reader with the basic skills and concepts required to write their own computer programs using the Ruby language.

The book begins with downloading and installing Ruby and then quickly gets the reader writing their first program - and it's not "Hello World". Pine instructs the reader on the basics covering everything you'd expect: numbers, strings, variables, type conversion, basic IO, methods, flow control, classes, and more. The author does a fine job making the material easy to read and easy to understand through his clear presentation and conversational tone. "Learn to Program" is chock full of simple examples, and this book is very well suited to sitting down with at your keyboard and working your way through each chapter. The chapters are short and can be absorbed quickly without bogging the reader down unnecessarily. Several of the chapters conclude with short programming assignments for the reader to attempt in order to apply the concepts just learned.

"Learn to Program" is written for those who have little to no experience programming. It is a fine introduction for the person who has never written a single line of code. It's no Dummies book though, and a certain degree of comfort and familiarity with computers is a prerequisite for getting the most out of the book. Pine never tells us exactly who his audience is, but it would certainly be suitable for the college student, technically minded adult or gifted high school student.

As much as I like this book, and I do like this book, there are a few things that could serve to complement it. First off, I'm surprised to find that there's no index. It's not a huge book and the chapters are well laid out, but it's hard to imagine the rationale for not including an index. Also, the book could stand to have some more assignments for the reader to try. They are there, but there aren't enough of them in my opinion. It would be nice to see a companion workbook to provide more problems to work through and to provide sample solutions for those problems. While "Learn to Program" doesn't read like a textbook, add the workbook and some lesson plans and I suspect you'd have the basis for a nice course in introductory programming.

While I suspect an argument could be made as to whether or not every vital Ruby feature was covered, I would conclude that every feature required to get the beginner writing code was presented. It's important when evaluating this book to keep in mind that its purpose is to teach programming and not to teach the reader how to become a master with the Ruby language. "Learn to Program" is a fine introduction to programming and demonstrates that Ruby is well suited for this task.

This is a fine introduction to programming using the Ruby programming language. It also serves as a good introduction to Ruby for programmers, though the Pick axe book would be better for that. All the basics are covered, flow control, variables, classes are covered in some detail. The text is jovial and clear.

This is a fun book that is easy to get through. If you have had trouble learning to program in the past you might like to try again with Ruby. It's a very friendly language and this book makes it even easier.

First things first, this is a wonderful book for learning to use Ruby on Rails. While reading this book, I asked myself "why aren't more beginners books written like this?" For a beginners book, the last thing that I want is a 700 page behemoth that screams THIS IS CONFUSING I AM SCARY I AM INTIMIDATING!!!!! At 150 pages, this book is concise, clear, to the point, and entertaining. For the low price that this book retails at, Chris Pine has written a book that gets away from deluging the reader with too much information, and instead gets back to basics what a BASIC book is supposed to be about (no basic the language, but basic in material).

If you want to learn Ruby on Rails and get up to speed on the ins and outs of this new, hot way to do web development with less code than ever before, pick up this book and you'll get moving in no time!!

***** HIGHLY RECOMMNEDED

When I was getting started, I spent several months using "Learn to Program in ---". While I learned a lot about that language, I missed a lot of the fundamental concepts and practices that would have made me a more effective programmer.
This book does an excellent job of teaching ***programming***. The author explains each idea in plain friendly English, and provides good examples in Ruby, one of the simplest languages. Even experienced programmers might enjoy (and benefit?) from reading this book. This book is so clear and well written, I'll also use it to teach programming to my home-schooled children when they're ready.

Learn to Program by Chris Pine is a concise introduction to the world of Learn to Program Coverprogramming using an interpreted scripting language called Ruby. An initial "cool point" goes to Pine for writing Learn to Program around Ruby, which is totally free to use, copy, modify, and distribute. The examples start from the basics of getting Ruby correctly installed and configured for your particular operating system. Although Ruby is mostly developed on Linux, it is a cross-platform language that is supported on many types of UNIX, DOS, Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP, MacOS, BeOS, and OS/2. I ran the examples on my Windows XP laptop without any problems, using a simple, free text editor called Textpad for some of the examples and the command line to round out my experience. The best part of it all...all of the programming tools were free! Gotta love it.

Pine aptly starts out with the essentials for most newbies to programming: data types, arithmetic operations, variables, and variable assignments. I found the overall approach and programming examples to be fun, detailed, and loaded with little tidbits of information, which gave great insight into the "how" and "why" of things. Pine's examples and explanations throughout Learn to Program were great at illustrating the power of Ruby and programming in general, without having the overtly silly and annoying tone typically found in the "Dummies" series of books.

Learn to Program progressively and painlessly takes the reader through increasing complex (for most newbies) programming concepts such as methods, classes, objects, recursion, and flow control. To reinforce the concepts in each chapter there are sections called "A Few Things to Try", which were both interesting and amusing. One of the more interesting topics involved writing simple programs to read, write, save, and load files using YAML. (YAML is a format for representing objects as strings). It's always fun to learn how to dig around in various files to extract and manipulate information. This should also come in handy when managing log files on several OpenVMS servers I manage. Yes, there is a tested version of Ruby (version X1.8-1X014) for OpenVMS Alpha V7.3-1 and V7.3-2! The final chapter of Learn to Program tied all of the concepts together and introduced the use of blocks and procs as a step beyond using custom methods. The proc examples were an eloquent introduction into the more conceptually challenging topic of passing objects into methods and returning objects from methods. I remember learning the power of passing objects to and from methods in a college Java course (years ago), only after we were taken through the paces of writing programs the "dumb" way without knowing how to do this. I wish I had read this book before I took that class.

Learn to Program is an excellent book for anyone who has an interest in learning to program. It is written for true beginners, who have little or no programming experience. Surprising enough, Pine magically manages to go from "What is an integer?" to full-blown object-oriented programming in less than 200 pages. Another bonus is that you will be learning Ruby, one of the newer, (in my opinion) sexier programming languages currently in circulation (i.e. COBOL=not sexy, Ruby=sexy).

Learn to Program is thoroughly engaging and informative and manages to painlessly convey some pretty sophisticated programming concepts that can benefit both novice and more experienced programmers. If you want to learn to program or want a great introduction to Ruby, Learn to Program belongs on your bookshelf.

-Matt Largo
<a href="http://mattlargo.blogspot.com/2006/02/book-review-learn-to-program.html">Matt Largo's Cerebral Vortex</a>

<a href="http://blogcritics.org/author.php?author=Matt%20Largo">Matt Largo's Articles on Blogcritics.org</a>

Learn how to write programs quickly and easily even if your programming skills are almost non-existent with Learn To Program, which uses the popular new programming language Rudy to provide a turn- key course for bare-bones beginners. Begin with the easy one-line programs and advance to more complicated real-life applications with a book which shows how to write a range of programs, from handy utilities and applications to streamlining computer operations for maximum speed and efficiency. You can't get any easier than Learn To Program.

This claims to be aimed towards absolute beginners.
While I admire the intentions of this book, it fails to deliver since it is not at all pedagogical enough to be for absolute beginners.

Having programmed some Assembler and Basic back in the Amiga-days, even I was just able to follow along halfway. Then, about in the middle of the book, it turns too complex and confusing too quickly.

I found 'Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional' to be much easier to follow than this book.
But still, credits to the author for good intentions.

This book (Learn to Program) is just great. I'm really impressed. My business partner has been working through it, and I expect her to be jumping in and taking over our Rails development projects by next week. Well maybe not, but this book is more than just a good introduction to programming. It's a *great* introduction to programming, because the author has chosen to teach programming with Ruby. In my opinion, Ruby is the perfect language to teach programming. Its power is obvious, but often overlooked is how pretty it is to read, and how obvious its code is.

Taking just a little time each day for the past week, my partner has worked halfway through the book, and best of all, actually gets it! She has even completed all of the exercises, something I don't recall having done at that stage when I was learning to code. She may not jump in and take over our Rails project, but we may well be speaking the same language real soon.

Excellent book!

Chris have a talent here, his writing is funny - it keeps you entertained and to my horror - it actually teaches you stuff!!

I highly recommend all of Chris' writing.

Martin

This book was great until Chapter 8. Now it's going way too fast without enough examples. Also there are only a few practice exercises now and they start out too advanced so that you can't do them without looking at the answers. This does not inspire confidence! There should be more practice exercises at the end of the chapter, starting with easy ones and getting harder and harder.