Review: Learn to program 2nd edition

As I'm taking a brake from running to prevent shin injuries. So I had time to finish reading my latest book, 'Learn to program 2nd edition'. Well I've finished it and thought I'd share my feelings about it in a review, so here it is:



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.

Since the second edition is really just from the press, there are no other reviews. So you'll just have to do with mine (I'm a critic so don't worry!):

Amazon

For the Dutch

Growth patterns

Yesterday's visit to the 'keukenhof', the famous Dutch flower gardens, took it's toll on today's run. I've spent most of the day walking and taking pictures of beautiful flowers. It was a great way to practice on my photography and I managed to take a few nearly professional shots. Nature is amazing. Walking around in the keukenhof all day enhanced the pain in my knees and feet that I had since my last training. But it was time for lesson number 7. So I went for a run but it was a torture. The stats say it all:




But there is an upside, it was a bad day for me. So on a bad day I can even run 3K's, thats quite some growth since the running shop. Even though I love Evy's podcast, I do need some more info on this whole running thing. For example, how to avoid injuries. So I 'decided' to order some books. For me it allready is not much of a decision as it's more some obsessive-compulsive disorder. This time my book-shopping spree limited itself to one running book and one ruby book. Since Evy is cool I decided to just buy her 'start to run' book and in that way give her some of the kudo's she (and not the record companies) deserves.



My ruby book was 'learn to program 2nd edition'. I checked out the online version and understood all code examples directly. It seems I have progressed a bit in my ruby coding as well. Though this book is for the real beginners, there is always something new to learn from a good resource. I like the small size of the book and the quality of the pragmatic programmer series. They have a clear, direct and down-to-earth approach to explain stuff. So it seemed to be one of the good recourses, and the price of that book just made it easy to put in the basket!