Learn to Program, Second Edition (The Facets of Ruby Series)

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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.

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

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.

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.

I got this book to share with my children as a possible resource for learning to program.

I couldn't get past the programming examples about wetting the bed, comments about dirty notes from his girlfriend, and lots of "dudes". I sent it back without using it.

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
Matt Largo's Cerebral Vortex

Matt Largo's Articles on Blogcritics.org

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

I bought this book in general because of the hype around Ruby and some of the positive reviews of this book. It claims to be a place to begin to learn how to program. But it's not...Two general reasons why not to start here: 1) There is just not enough supporting documentation to create an effective learning path and 2) there are exercises at the end of the chapters but no answer key. If you get lost where do you go for help?
I researched for over a month where to begin and still got it wrong, so it is a very difficult decision. I switched to Python, but thought about Perl very hard simply because it has been around and there is plenty of supporting documentation and websites.
Also, I have noticed that there are a lot of reviews that are not very genuine and probably generated by people affiliated with the authors or publishers. Also, there are many complaints about poor editing in many other books coming out recently that point to a desire to get out to market fast. I think this is the case with this book and some of the other Ruby books. Publishers want to fill different niches fast to make cash on the momentum of the hype!
The absolute best way to learn programming is to take a class(es) as the local community college or university and expect to be at it for a while before you are proficient. That is what I am going to do :)
My last thought is that these books that promote "personality" are doing so because of a lack of substance and thoroughness. Do lots of research before you buy and realize that a lot of the stuff that gets thrown out there quickly is junk and better books are sure to come along later. I like my calculus book because it is focused on teaching! I can always take a break and watch Seinfeld.
Ruby may be a great language for all I know. But the publishers of Ruby books seem to be more interested in the cash flow than the pedagogy.

While looking for a book on entry level ruby programming I came across this. The reviews were good so I bought it. I was extremely disapointed however. First, the book is very small. There simply is not a lot of content here. I did like the type and text and layout.

But the biggest problem and the one not mentioned anywhere is that this is not an entry level programming book. This is one step before that. It simply is "extremely" basic. What I mean by that is that is written for someone who probably has never even messed around with any programming language at all or has a lot of computer knowledge at all. It's like a junior high course to students who don't have a clue. This is great for some, but not mentioned anywhere and surely a disappointment and worthless to anyone who has even wrote a simple hello world program before.

I really enjoyed this book. Very clear, straight forward, and witty. Would get a five if it had an index

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.

I absolutely love this book! I have tried time and time again to get different books and take different classes to learn how to program. Everything from Unix courses to Java, C++, Scripting and many more that were just plain over my head! There are too many "beginner" books that just aren't Beginner enough! I stumbled upon this book in a book store--sat and read 4 pages and knew this would be the book to finally get me programming. I sit and read a chapter or two a day with my laptop and work my way through different exercises. The wonderful thing about Ruby is that it is so versatile. The book can explain the basics and with a little imagination you can come up with your own programs that are slightly different that the exercises given. (Basically each chapter gives building blocks to teach you, but there are more than one way to stack the building blocks and you can make different style buildings with those blocks.) For instance, one assignment was to make a program ask the name of the person typing at the keyboard, then it should repeat the name and say something like, "Oh, BLANK is such a nice name..."

With the building blocks of the chapter, not only was I able to create a program that did just that, I created a program that said,
"Hi, my name is X."
"What's your name?"
[your typed name]
"Wow! [your typed name] is very pretty."
"What is your middle name?"
[your typed middle name]
"And your last name?"
[your typed last name]
"I must say, [your first][your middle][your last name] is absolutely stunning!"
"It was nice chatting with you [your entire name]."



That's one thing I love about this book. It give you the building blocks, and without too much work (because it's so well written,) you build!

I picked up this book several times at the bookstore but never purchased it until... I read the first chapter. I had always flipped through the book and thought that all of it looked like greek to me, and that I would never be able to understand it.

Once I started reading it, I enjoyed it, I understood it, and I learned the concepts.

I got excited and I bought the ultimate reference to Ruby the "Pick Axe" guide, and I also bought Agile Web Development with Rails.

If Learn to Program would have been bad or badly written I probably would have given up on ever learning to program.

If you are a web developer you owe it to yourself to check out this book. I tried to learn PHP first, but with Ruby and this beginners book to program, I am actually learning it.

It would be even better if it had an index and there was a website you could go to, where you could find help/answers to the extra end of chapter questions.

This is a great place to start to learn how to program.

If you want to become a programmer then I reccomend that you dont get this book. Why you might ask....well because you probobly dont want to start with ruby for your first programming language. I reccomend starting with VB, the C languages or python, dont start with Ruby. But if you are experienced then why not learn another language too.

The best book out there if you want to learn programming. If you have a little experience but are unsure, you will like this book too. The book is also suited as a lightweight introduction to Ruby. But if you have a decent amount of experience in another programming language and want to learn Ruby, or if you want to dive in directly, consider a book like Programming Ruby or the Ruby Way.

The book is very readable and funny. You'll understand most things without too much effort because of the way the author explains things clearly.

The book contains fun exercises such as the 'angry boss' or 'deaf grandma' exercises.

The only minor points were that the exercises were mostly not very practical for real life situations. The last few chapters were not as clear in explaining things as most of the book.

This book offers great value for money and is well worth your time, adding to that it's not a big book and very reasonably priced. Definitely worth it.

[...]

"Learn to Program" is a quick, playful introduction to the Ruby programming language. I read it in just a few hours (including frequent laugh breaks), and I'm not the fastest reader ever. However, I've been a developer for years and I'm quick to grasp familiar programming concepts, so if you're brand new to programming, it may take a bit longer to get through it.

In general, this book is mostly a light read, and it makes Ruby immediately accessible to you.

The reason I am giving the book 4 stars instead of 5 is because I think the book missed its target a bit. About halfway through, I noticed that it begins to gloss over some rather advanced concepts, and at about the same time, it begins to use a few concepts without much explanation. If I didn't have any programming experience (or an awesome wife who learned Ruby in parallel with me), I think I would've been confused as to what exactly was going on. For example, I think readers should skip ahead to Chapter 14 as soon as they see "foo.each do" in one of the single-digit chapters, and learn what that construct is all about. Otherwise, you'll spend 6 or 7 chapters in the dark.

Also, I think this book would be a GREAT introduction to programming for logically-endowed adults, and very gifted students. I do not think that an average Joe could pick this title up and get through it ENTIRELY without some difficulty. Making Ruby accessible to everybody would literally be an UNBELIEVABLE achievement, so I am still very appreciative of how well Chris Pine did in creating such an accessible introduction.

I bought this book to help me learn Ruby as part of a project for a CS course at college. I don't mind that it's geared towards absolute beginners (I'm not exactly a coding genius myself!), but I do not appreciate the author's style.

Chris Pine is trying too hard to be like, cool or whatever. Dude . . . we're, like, not all high school students, ya know? So stop trying so hard to be cartoony.

A little bit of friendliness and humor is essential if you want to get your audience interested in a dry subject like programming. (Even 'hello world' is kind of silly). But this author just takes silly strings and cutesyness too far.

I started on the programming projects I but I just could not be bothered with them. There's a 'conversation' with a high-school teacher, another one with a 'deaf grandma', who repeats back wrongly what you type in, and even a program that reproduces a conversation with his 2-year-old kid! (oh, puh-lease . . .)

Look, it's great that you've got a nice wife and cute kids, but really, we didn't buy the book to learn about your family life. We're trying to learn to program, remember?

At some point all this silliness has got to stop. We've got to move onto comparisons of numbers and arrays and all that (gasp!) Boring Stuff. Maybe things get more serious later on, but after the first 10 chapters, I gave up waiting for the author to stop pretending to be a comedian for 15-year-olds.

Don't waste your money on this book. If you want to learn Ruby, go to the website ([...]) and download The Book of Ruby for free by Huw Collingbourne. The author has a warm, friendly style but jumps straight into real programming and you will actually learn something.

The fully updated, revised second edition of LEARN TO PROGRAM teaches how to program and begins with small, simple on-line programs. Beginners will appreciate both the easy, lighthearted approach and an edition that blends suggestions from prior readers around the world to make concepts even clearer, with updated examples to use the latest version of Ruby. It's the perfect starting point for any would-be programmer and any library catering to them.

Chris Pine explains what programming is with very simple words and metaphores, ones that everyone can understand.

He doesn't overwhelm you with complex concepts or tools and dives very progressively into the programming universe, chosing concrete code samples. The choice of Ruby is simply accurate : intuitive & powerful object language, no fancy IDE, just a notepad and a command line and you'll see the first results after reading the first pages of this book.

What is a program? a language? a method? a variable? Most programmers are so immersed into their art that they can't find a simple definition. Chris Pine makes it accessible and this ability gives you a fresh clean perspective on it.

With this book, you can teach you kids to program in a few days (8-10 yrs-old).

Chris Pine is pretty good with handling 'dumbed' people. I still haven't solved the exercises as I was in a hurry to finish the book before my vacation. Now that I am back, I will complete it one of these weekends.

We are using this book to teach our 8 year old, and it has been GREAT! It is simple, and easy to understand AND FUN! She has never done any programming before and this book goes through the why and how of programming. If you have done programming before the first part of the book will be skipped. But for the beginner it is perfect! Goes into a little detail but doesn't bog you down with too much information. Just enough!

The most "accidental" books are the good ones--the books where the author, who may or may not be a writer, finds himself writing, and the audience presents itself through the most pristine grass roots demand. This was such a book, and its evolution is proof of its excellence. Chris Pine, now famous as a creator of the Opera browser, took a casual afternoon pen to describing Ruby on Rails, and it quickly became a bible on the topic, suitable for any hobbyist or introductory programming class.

I have wanted to learn programming for a long time. I even had a few false starts with Java. This book was perfect. It started at ground zero. Very basic. I learned a bit about programming and really found the beauty in Ruby's language and structure.

I am now going back and documenting all the exercises in the book to cement my knowledge of the concepts. I put up a website as well so if you are going through the book and want to see how someone solved a problem, it's there for the taking:
http://codeexperiment.squarespace.com

I picked up Learn to Program for two reasons:

* I was curious about a book that could teach you to program. Where do you start? Also, I originally learned how to program (in Basic) from a book with no computer.
* I wanted to learn Ruby and that's the programming language that Learn to Program uses.

I was impressed with the book. Chris Pine starts out with the very basics - how to set up your computer with Ruby and how to create and run a program and takes you through a few basic programs, algorithms like sort and finally simple interactive games and file manipulation.

If you are looking to learn how to program or how to teach your kid to program, Learn to Program is a good starting point.

I bought this book a couple of summers ago. My son and I (he was 11 years of age at the time) worked through most of the exercises in the book together. I took a C programming class years ago. My son is good at math and has solid logic skills. I did a web-search for books focused on teaching kids to program - and I talked to a programmer friend who said that Ruby would be a good first language - so I bought this book. I've looked at some of the recent negative reviews - and while I do think there's room for improvement (such as an answer key) here's the differentiating element: my son and I got stuck on an exercise, so Matt wrote Chris Pine (the author) an email asking for help - a personalized answer was forthcoming the next day! Bottom line: Ruby is an entirely appropriate first language to learn, and this book is extremely applicable to the beginner with no programming background. Will you have to buy a second book to continue your learning after you complete this book? Sure. But isn't that usually the case? I don't know too many books that are appropriate for both beginner and expert - this book helps one do exactly what the title states: Learn to Program. Enjoy!

My goal is to learn Ruby on Rails in the next year, so I wasn't disappointed that this book focuses on learning Ruby. If you want a general purpose 'learn to program' book, this book may not be for you.

I liked the practices. They are particularly challenging, because no solutions or index are provided. If you get stuck on a practice, you may have to reread the chapter and still refer to your copy of the PickAxe book ("Programming Ruby" by Dave Thomas). It took me hours to discover that I needed to use the 'push' method to complete an array practice, but I _do_ remember that lesson.

At times the humor is a bit adolescent, the tone too casual, but the conversational tone relaxes those of us who may be intimidated about learning a programming language. This would be an excellent starter for a high school student interested in learning to program.

So, I deducted points for no practice solutions, no index, and occaisional lapses in humor, but overall it's worth the money if you want to learn Ruby.

I really enjoyed this book. The "personality" of the book is far more enjoyable to read than most other programming books. If you are having trouble with terminology or missed a day in Computer Science 101, than this is the book for you.

The fact this book uses Ruby as it's main programming language is secondary, and learning what simple statements mean is obviously the point of the book.

If you are an experienced programmer, you'll fine this book highly annoying.

I'd HIGHLY recommend this book to anyone curious about programming. This is a gentle step into the pool.