Comments on: What I Read On My Q409 Vacation

By: Kelly Taylor

Kelly Taylor — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 15:18:01 +0000

My team is using Rails for a few projects but I'm not proficient (PHP guy). To keep up, I occasionally watch screencasts from http://railscasts.com and have found that to be a fun/easy way to absorb some of the syntax.

By: Brad Feld

Brad Feld — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 23:09:04 +0000

Anyone who can wrangle 1-2-3 macros is a programmer in my book. I wrote my share of those in my time.

By: @msuster

@msuster — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 23:06:49 +0000

Brad, this made me laugh. I, too, have fantasies about starting to program again and always thought it would be Ruby. I'm wondering where the spare time is going to come from. Maybe if I announce that I no longer do email so don't write me? I stopped programming in 1994. People still tease me because I'm stuck in a COBOL, DB2, CICS Visual Basic time warp. Oh, and I can do some mean Lotus (er, Excel) Macros! Happy birthday.

By: Brad Feld

Brad Feld — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:23:04 +0000

No prob – it’s a problem on my end.

By: Bill Mosby

Bill Mosby — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:21:57 +0000

Sorry about the triple post, had no idea the site was taking them when it seemed not to be responding.

By: Brad Feld

Brad Feld — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:57:05 +0000

Nope – buying it now. Thanks for the recommendation.

By: Bill Mosby

Bill Mosby — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:17:55 +0000

Have you ever read "The Road to Reality" by Roger Penrose? I thought I knew something about mathematics but I realize after reading it twice that I don't. It is still valuable for giving the reader a good feel for what physicists and mathematicians have gone through over the last few hundred years to arrive at today's picture of the universe.

By: Bill Mosby

Bill Mosby — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:10:59 +0000

" I missed object oriented programming completely and find the level of complexity to do simple things in today’s languages completely baffling."

Ain't that the truth. Glad I'm not the only one who thinks it's complex. And I have followed the developments for about 10 years now, at least using Xcode and whatever it was called before that. Narrow exposure, perhaps. Still complex. I usually start from some sample code and build on it.

By: zack

zack — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:38:38 +0000

So also, http://guides.rubyonrails.org/ has a pretty good breakdown of each part of rails. It's good as a reference that's not the api docs.

By: Brad Feld

Brad Feld — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 04:49:04 +0000

Yup – totally agree. I’ve got a project planned for the second half of December and we’ll see how it goes.