Customer Reviews

REBOL For Dummies

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REBOL is touting themselves as "the next generation of distributed communications". With it, a programmer should be able to develop for most platforms. Currently, REBOL supports 40 platforms by using 10 built-in Internet protocols. REBOL can exchange GUI content. Not only from machine to machine, but from users to machines.

This book shows you the basicis of what you can do with REBOL. It is a quick read, so you can make some development decisions without investing a great deal of research time. The book is easy to read and I preferred it over the typical "Dummies" book.

It is however, debateable as to whether you can get more from going to the REBOL website. If you are an experienced programmer the website may become your source. If you are a new programmer looking for "cutting edge" languages, but prefer to learn in a more casual manner, get this book.

This book provides the fastest way to start using Rebol effectively. Covers alot of ground with many examples and effective explanations. I think the author decided to do a 'dummies' book so that he could occasionally insert some humor, and do examples that build off earlier examples. It definitely covers more material than the typical dummies book, and will be useful for the software professional. One of Rebols main bragging rights is its effectiveness at forming dialects. This book only used 30 pages to cover the parsing/dialect topic, --I would have liked more on this topic. The book included a very good treatment of how to get a server up and running using Rebol. Highly recommended, good introduction to a language which may well replace perl.

For those new to REBOL, this is an ideal book to learn with. A fast and easy read, you will be writing useful code in no time and having fun doing it. Used in conjunction to the REBOL/Core User's guide, it is a great way to hit the ground running.

If you've been using REBOL for a while this is a quick read, a great refresher and handy reference.

There are only three books available on Rebol; Rebol The Official Guide, the Rebol Core book available online at the Rebol site, and Rebol for Dummies. This one is the best for a beginner. Not only does it introduce the language concepts but the excercises really give you a taste for how to actually do things. I wish the author would write about the VID (GUI) too. Hopefully he will write about Rebol version 3 when it is released.

Despite the somewhat annoying "humor" and slang-filled writing style, this book does give a painless introduction to the Rebol language. However, after reading most of the book you still won't find any real reason to USE Rebol. It just has no advantage over Perl, which is much more widespread. Rebol does appear to have a smaller "footprint" and is supported over many platforms. If that's what you need, Rebol is an interesting option. For any platform where Perl is available, Rebol is a poor 2nd choice. The Rebol website also has a ton of stuff, but I think this book is a much easier way to survey this unusual language.