Ebook: Learn to Program, Second Edition

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.