The Poignant Guide is an essay of modern art. It is a lyrical writing, l'art pour l'art designed to surprise readers. It will be best enjoyed by those, who like dadaism and works such as Merda d'artista. This short-novel sized piece is many things, but it is not a textbook. Instead, the reader's expectation to see a textbook is the artistic substance the author builds upon. I guess I will need to search my drawer for my own artistic license to justify this spoiler, but yes, here it is, I think they call it intervention art nowadays. To those interested in textbooks, Poignant Guide is unsuitable for children and offensive to adults. 1st 5 feet of text: incoherent noise. Not a teaching method, not metaphors, just noise. First coherent signal: the author tells us he knows in advance he is not gonna make any money with his book (so no teaching, onions and foxes are good enough for us). Several noise-filled chapters follow, featuring pieces of author's internal world, laced with occasional code snippets (such as how to use Hashes and fetch webpages) and more or less subtle insults to the reader. Through several more lyrical, watery chapters, the "Guide" reaches its peak: D&D Creature class with four attributes (life, strength, charisma and weapon). The author here ventures to prove that he is a real Ruby hacker. He asserts he could teach us things way above 'just plain Ruby', such as class_eval and metaprogramming (code writing code!). But he will not. He 'totally understands, if we have come to this point and our eyes are spinning in their sockets and our knees have locked up'. Through method_missing and exception raising, the "Guide" slides back to postmodernism and thus, in about 2 more chapters, it reaches its end.

A strange, ongoingly-composed (now more like legacy, as of 2011) introduction to RubyLanguage by a person who calls himself WhyTheLuckyStiff:

http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/book/

http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/images/about.the.poignant.guide-1.gif

The author uses an elf, a pet ham, cartoon foxes, leaf-based currency and star-monkeys to teach basic ScriptingLanguage and ObjectOriented concepts.

For a guide that teaches the language, though, it has awful little RubyLanguage in some sections, and none in the sidebars, which contain some of the most amusing stuff:

	 :	So this new book. The Scarf Eaters. It’s a coming-of-age novel. But it’s also a beginner’s guide to MacromediaFlash. It’s like Judy Blume crossed Praystation. It’s like 0sil8 starring Hillary Duff.
	 :	I don’t want to give away the plot at all, but to tug your appetite I’ll just say this: one kid talks to his dead brother in ActionScript. More to come.

''The Poignent Guide is really a book for beginning at the beginning, for people who need to be introduced to concepts like "strings" and "functions". I'm many lines of code past that point, but nevertheless read the entire thing just for the entertainment value.''

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CategoryBook CategoryRuby CuteBooks