kbaird.github.io - Ruby

(Smalltalk * 0.55) + (Lisp * 0.35) + (Perl * 0.1)

I have moved the Ruby by Example: Concepts and Code Updates to a separate page.

I'm a big fan of the Ruby programming language. I particularly appreciate its fusion of object-orientation and functional programming, in which objects provide handy namespaces and polymorphism, while operations can largely be non-destructive / stateless transformations of input/output streams using methods like map, inject, find_all, join and the like. Composition of Procs is also nice.

I have written a book for No Starch Press called Ruby by Example: Concepts and Code, in which I use specific (and hopefully useful) short programs to demonstrate concepts in Ruby, with a particular focus on the things I find interesting about the language. It's very incremental, and friendly to newcomers. I will consider the book successful if a complete neophyte can read it cover-to-cover and then go back and start improving on my early examples. According to Michael Ivancic's review of Ruby By Example at Amazon, that seems to have happened with the Rails example photo album app, which I find very gratifying. You can find a tarball of all the code from the book (and other things related to the book) at the No Starch page.

I made this simple site with the Rails web app development framework. I've already spent more time messing with the CSS than coding. The rollover links are based on a demo by Eric Meyer.