23 Programming Languages compared through their Amazon book sales

Please note that this article is intended as a fun way of looking at several programming languages from a different and unusual angle. I have adopted many oversimplifications which make the outcome’s possible insight very limited. Take it at face value for what it is: a fun post that yields a general idea of the programming languages’ respective popularities, but don’t consider it as a...

Ruby and Rails books, Textmate and FastRi

Ruby and Rails books keep popping up on the (virtual and real) shelves, which means that it may be slightly puzzling for newcomers to decide which books to spend their hard earned cash on. In the spirit of providing guidance in this process, I’ve prepared the Recommended Books for Ruby and Rails page. The recommendations are organized by skill level and should provide the reader with a nice logical sequence of...

Collage of Ruby and Rails books

While working on a presentation for a series of conferences that I’ll be speaking at, I’ve put together this image, to convey the attention that Ruby and Rails are currently getting from publishers. Feel free to use it for your own presentations, optionally crediting it to me if you’d like (you don’t have to). The list of books may not be complete. And yes, the book images are from...

Italian Ruby book and cool suggested reading

I’m glad to announce that Ruby per applicazioni web has been published by Apogeo. This is the first Ruby book written in Italian and I was a contributor as a technical reviewer and author of an appendix about Ruby and DB2. As you can see my name is only located inside the book and not on the cover, because while international publishers are usually glad to add contributors to the cover page, however in this case...

Ruby Cookbook: Rough Cuts Version

Currently online O’Reilly is selling the rough cuts version (basically the beta version) of the Ruby Cookbook. It’s a pleasure to see that many good books about Ruby are being published. This book authored by Leonard Richardson and Lucas Carlson is particularly special to me. In fact, I have contributed to the book with three recipes and related full-length explanations. My recipes are about using RMagick to...

Ruby rocks and Java sucks?

Many hackers are quite religious about their programming language of choice, but I’m not. Whenever possible I try to be rational about things that matter to me. For this reason you won’t hear me saying things like: “Ruby rocks, Java sucks!”. Indeed Ruby rocks, but it does so for me, for the kind of development that I love to do and for the way I like to think and express my thoughts in code. I am quite...