Whys Poignant Guide To Ruby.pdf

About this Book

Kon’nichi wa, Ruby

1. Opening This Book

Pretend that you’ve opened this book (although you probably have opened this book), just to find a huge onion right in the

middle crease of the book. (The manufacturer of the book has included the onion at my request.)

So you’re like, “Wow, this book comes with an onion!” (Even if you don’t particularly like onions, I’m sure you can appreciate

the logistics of shipping any sort of produce discreetly inside of an alleged programming manual.)

Then you ask yourself, “Wait a minute. I thought this was a book on Ruby, the incredible new programming language from

Japan. And although I can appreciate the logistics of shipping any sort of produce discreetly inside of an alleged programming

manual: Why an onion? What am I supposed to do with it?”

No. Please don’t puzzle over it. You don’t need to do anything with the onion. Set the onion aside and let it do something with

you .

I’ll be straight with you. I want you to cry. To weep. To whimper sweetly. This book is a poignant guide to Ruby. That means

code so beautiful that tears are shed. That means gallant tales and somber truths that have you waking up the next morning in

the arms of this book. Hugging it tightly to you all the day long. If necessary, fashion a makeshift hip holster for Why’s

(Poignant) Guide to Ruby , so you can always have this book’s tender companionship.

You really must sob once. Or at least sniffle. And if not, then the onion will make it all happen for you.

sidebar!

2. The Dog Story

What I’m Going to Do With the

Massive Proceeds from this Book

So try this first bit of poignancy on for size:

One day I was walking down one of those busy roads covered with car dealerships (this

was shortly after my wedding was called off) and I found an orphaned dog on the road.

A wooly, black dog with greenish red eyes. I was kind of feeling like an orphan myself,

so I took a couple balloons that were tied to a pole at the dealership and I relocated

them to the dog’s collar. Then, I decided he would be my dog. I named him Bigelow.

Anyone who’s written a book can tell you

how easily an author is distracted by visions

of grandeur. In my experience, I stop twice

for each paragraph, and four times for each

panel of a comic, just to envision the wealth

and prosperity that this book will procure for

my lifestyle. I fear that the writing of this

book will halt altogether to make way for the

armada of SUVs and luxury towne cars that

We set off to get some Milkbones for Bigelow and, afterwards, head over to my place,

where we could sit in recliners and listen to Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci. Oh, and we’d also

need to stop by a thrift store and get Bigelow his own recliner.

are blazing away in my head.

But Bigelow hadn’t accepted me as his master. So five minutes later, the stupid dog

took a different crosswalk than I did and I never caught up. So whereas he had

previously only been lost once, he was now lost twice. I slowed my pace towards the

life of Milkbones and an extra recliner. I had a dog for five minutes.

Rather than stop my production of the

(Poignant) Guide, I’ve reserved this space as

a safety zone for pouring my empty and vain

wishes.

Stupid Benedict Arnold of a dog. I sat on a city bench and threw pinecones at a statue

of three sheep crossing a bridge. After that, I wept for hours. The tears just came. Now

there’s a little something poignant to get you started.

Today I was at this Italian restaraunt,

Granado’s, and I was paying my bill.

Happened to notice (under glass) a bottle of

balsamic vinegar going for $150. Fairly

small. I could conceal it in my palm. Aged

twenty-two years.

I wonder where he went with all those balloons. That crazy dog must have looked like

a party with legs.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that

bottle. It is often an accessory in some of

these obsessive fantasies. In one fantasy, I

walk into the restaraunt, toss a stack of

greenery on the counter and earnestly say to

the cashier, “Quick! I have an important

salad to make!”

It wasn’t much later that I pulled my own Bigelow. I printed out a bunch of pages on

Ruby. Articles found around the Web. I scanned through them on a train ride home

one day. I flipped through them for five minutes and then gave up. Not impressed.

I sat, staring out the window at the world, a life-sized blender mixing graffiti and iron

smelts before my eyes. This world’s too big for such a a little language , I thought.

Poor little thing doesn’t stand a chance. Doesn’t have legs to stand on.

Doesn’t have arms to swim.

In another, related fantasy, I am throwing

away lettuce. Such roughage isn’t befitting of

my new vinegar. No, I will have come to a

point where the fame and the aristocracy will

have corrupted me to my core. My new

lettuce will be cash. Cold, hard cash, Mrs.

Price.

And yet, there I was. One little man on a flimsy little train (and I even still had a baby

tooth to lose at the time) out of billions of people living on a floating blue rock. How

can I knock Ruby? Who’s to say that I’m not going to happen to choke on my cell

phone and die later that evening. Why’s dead, Ruby lives on.

The gravestone:

Soon, I will be expending hundreds for a

block of myzithra cheese.

What’s in his trachea? Oh, look, a Nokia!

My imaginations have now gone beyond

posessions, though. Certainly, I have

thought through my acquisition of grecian

urns, motorcades, airlines, pyramids,

dinosaur bones. Occassionally I’ll see

wind-tossed cities on the news and I’ll jot

down on my shopping list: Hurricane .

Just my luck. Finally get to have a good, long sleep underground, only to be constantly

disturbed by Pachelbel’s Canon going off in my stomach.

3. The Red Sun Rises

So, now you’re wondering why I changed my mind about Ruby. The quick answer is:

we clicked.

But, now I’m seeing a larger goal. Simply

put: what if I amassed such a fortune that

the mints couldn’t print enough to keep up

with my demand? So, everyone else would

be forced to use Monopoly money as actual

currency. And you would have to win in

Monopoly to keep food on the table. These

would be some seriously tense games. I

mean you go to mortgage St. James Place

and your kids start crying. In addition, I

think you’ll begin to see the end of those who

choose to use the Free Parking square as the

underground coffers for city funds.

Like when you meet Somebody in college and they look like somebody who used to hit

you in the face with paintbrushes when you were a kid. And so, impulsively, you

conclude that this new Somebody is likely a non-friend. You wince at their hair. You

hang up phones loudly during crucial moments in their anecdotes. You use your pogo

stick right there where they are trying to walk!

Six months later, somehow, you and Somebody are sitting at a fountain having a

perfectly good chat. Their face doesn’t look so much like that childhood nemesis.

You’ve met the Good Twin. You clicked.

So whereas I should probably be pounding your teeth in with hype about Ruby and the

tightly-knit cadre of pertinent ancronyms that accompany it everywhere (whetting the

collective whistles of your bosses and their bosses’ bosses), instead I will just let you

coast. I’ll let you freefall through some code, interjecting occassionally with my own

heartfelt experiences. It’ll be quite easy, quite natural.

You’ve got to hand it to fun money, though.

Fake money rules. You can get your hands

on it so quickly. For a moment, it seems like

you’re crazy rich. When I was a kid, I got

with some of the neighborhood kids and we

built this little Tijuana on our street. We

made our own pesos and wore sombreros

and everything!

I should offer you some sort of motivation, though. So, Smotchkkiss, I’m going to give

my three best reasons to learn Ruby and be done with it.

Brain health.

One kid was selling hot tamales for two

pesos each. Two pesos! Did this kid know

that the money was fake? Was he out of his

mind? Who invited this kid? Didn’t he know

this wasn’t really Tijuana? Maybe he was

really from Tijuana! Maybe these were real

pesos! Let’s go make more real pesos!

Vitamin R. Goes straight to the head. Ruby will teach you to express

your ideas through a computer. You will be writing stories for a

machine.

Creative skills, people. Deduction. Reason. Nodding intelligently. The

language will become a tool for you to better connect your mind to the

world. I’ve noticed that many experienced users of Ruby seem to be

clear thinkers and objective. (In contrast to: heavily biased and

coarse.)

I think we even had a tavern where you

could get totally hammered off Kool-Aid.

There’s nothing like a bunch of kids

stumbling around, mumbling incoherently

with punchy red clown lips.

One man on one island.

sidebar!

Ruby was born in Japan. Which is freaky. Japan is not known for its

software. And since programming languages are largely written in

English, who would suspect a language to come from Japan?

And yet, here we have Ruby. Against the odds, Yukihiro Matsumoto

created Ruby on February 24, 1993. For the past ten years, he has

steadily brought Ruby to a global audience. It’s triumphant and noble

and all that. Support diversity. Help us tilt the earth just a bit.

Free.

Using Ruby costs nothing. The code to Ruby itself is open for all of the world to inhale/exhale. Heck, this book is free.

It’s all part of a great, big giveaway that should have some big hitch to it.

You’d think we’d make you buy vacuums or timeshare or fake Monets. You’d think there’d be a 90 minute presentation

where the owner of the company comes out at the end and knuckles you into sealing the deal.

Nope, free.

With that, it’s time for the book to begin. You can now get out your highlighter and start dragging it along each captivating

word from this sentence on. I think I have enough hairspray and funny money on my person to keep me sustained until the

final page.

4. How Books Start

Now, if you ever have read a book, you know that no book can properly start without an exorbitant amount of synergy. Yes,

synergy. Maybe you didn’t know this. Synergy means that you and I are supposed to cooperate to make this a great reading

experience.

We start off the book by getting along well in the Introduction. This togetherness, this synergy , propels us through the book,

with me guiding you on your way. You give me a reassuring nod or snicker to indicate your progress.

I’m Peter Pan holding your hand. Come on, Wendy! Second star to the right and on till morning.

One problem here. I don’t get along well with people. I don’t hold hands very well.

Any of my staff will tell you. At the Opening Ceremonies of This Book (a catered event with stadium seating), I discovered that

the cucumber sandwiches weren’t served in tea towels. As a result, the butter hadn’t set with the cucumbers right… Anyways, I

made a big scene and set fire to some of the advertising trucks outside. I smashed this spotlight to pieces and so on. I had this

loud maniacal laughing thing going on deep into that night. It was a real mess.

But, since I don’t get along well with people, I hadn’t invited anyone but myself to the Opening Ceremonies of This Book. So it

wasn’t really that embarassing. I kept it under wraps and no one found out about the whole ordeal.

So you’ve got to know that synergy doesn’t actually mean synergy in this book. I can’t do normal synergy . No, in this

book, synergy means cartoon foxes . What I’m saying is: this book will be starting off with an exorbitant amount of

cartoon foxes .

And I will be counting on you to turn them into synergy .

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