Here's an interesting poll about VB on a pro-M$ site .
| Plankton: 1% Evil, 99% Hot Gas. |
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The Camel book is very good for that, because it strikes
the proper balance. On the one side, you have the
textbook approach, which spends the first chapter
telling you why you should learn to program and then
introduces concepts one at a time, starting with
variables and data types usually, so that by the time
you get to chapter 16 or so and get control-flow
structures so that you can actually *do* anything
you're bored out of your skull. Similarly,
you have the evangelistic approach taken by e.g. the
PHP documentation, wherein the docs continually remind
you not only how great the language is, but how much
*better* it is than X, Y, and Z. But rather than
show you what's better about it, they introduce you
to basic things like variables, data types, and so on,
so that before you get to the point where you can
actually *do* anything you've wandered off in disgust
to look at another language. Then you have the
Dummies approach, which makes a lot of jokes to put
the reader at ease, illustrates everything with
(usually extremely contrived) examples, and tries
to get some useful concepts like control flow in
fairly early, so that although the reader doesn't
know enough to write just anything, he can write
*something* more than Hello, World.
Anyway, as I was saying, the Camel book is one of the
books (the Inform Designer's Manual being
another1) that
does a good job of striking a balance between these
approaches. It has some hype about how great the
language is and how easy it makes things, but it
doesn't waste time deriding other langugaes and the
hype is carefully directed and illustrated -- i.e., it
doesn't just say, "Perl is great; it makes things very
easy to do"; rather, it says, "One of
the great things about Perl is that you can do *this*,
which is really easy and works as follows...". It has
examples, but the examples are designed to fit within
the flow of the text, rather than being contrived out
of randomness and the flow of the text written around
them. It makes jokes to set the reader at ease, but
the jokes are less lame than in Dummies books and do
not consume entire otherwise-pointless paragraphs.
It introduces simple concepts like variables and data
types, but it shows these being used with other
features such as conditionals and loops, so that the
reader who has already learned another language can
quickly pick up enough to be dangerous (or to write
code that does something useful).
The Inform Designer's Manual is like this too,
especially the section on the world model and
the object-oriented portion of the language. It
is often considered to be *the* major reason
why Inform is so much more popular than the
otherwise-just-about-as-good TADS (though there
are long discussions back and forth about this).
Of all Perl books to have someone read if you want
to convert them from another language, I think the
Camel book is the best choice.
1 The book itself
says it this way: <q>In trying to be both a tutorial and reference work, this book aims itself in style halfway between the two extremes of manual, Tedium and Gnawfinger's Elements of Batch Processing in COBOL-66, third edition, and Mr Blobby's Blobby Book of Computer Fun. (This makes some sections both leaden and patronising.)</q>
$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$ ;->();print$/
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[d/l] |
"I've been in prison my whole life... and I didn't even know it!"If you think that Perl opened his eyes, get him to switch from Windows to Linux....it's like an evangelical experience. | [reply] |
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amen to this one :)
however, when 802.11 G... half USB Drives (that i have tried-- sandisk being one that DOES work) dont work... and me who doesnt use it to its fullest potential being the key influence... he will prob stick with windows.
btw, off topic but... could you recomend a "camel book" (basically an, "if you only buy one, buy this one" for freebsd? that of course is for the "anonymous monk" who prob wont look at this again...
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