Linkdump for September 17th
¶ by Rob Friesel-
Fantastic short fiction by Tom Greene over at Strange Horizons. Recommended.
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Matt Neuburg:
My way of describing Ruby is somewhat peculiar, but there is method in my madness. Most discussions of Ruby explain it “from the bottom up” (starting with strings and arrays and hashes and working up to classes and modules); I explain it “from the top down” (starting with modules). That’s a deliberate pedagogical choice. I learned Ruby from the bottom up, and that made Ruby much harder, and take much longer, to understand; top-down explanation is better, and gives a clearer picture, right away, of how Ruby works.
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Great list posted over at Wondermark. (Via… Prismatic? @fogus? All of the above? None of the above?) Some familiar titles in there, and some others I've never heard of. Either way: "As if my to-read list weren't long enough…"
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By Nikos Maravitsas, writing at Java Code Geeks. It's a little light on content (mostly throwing out a few bits of jargon and then some links) but the overall theme of the post brings up a good point. One thing I felt that he was missing is that the most important thing that this "foundation" gives you is a shared vocabulary with other developers; speaking as a self-taught developer, I can definitely say that this is one place where I keep trying to catch up. It isn't so much not knowing what a "bubblesort" is, it's not knowing that that's what it's even called, and that's what handicaps you when you try talking to other developers that do have this background.
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