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Old 29th October 2010
thirdm thirdm is offline
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Join Date: May 2009
Posts: 248
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Thanks for your help, both of you. I looked over some PHP and Ruby books in the bookstore this evening (oddly, they had next to nothing on Python and Django). I ended up choosing _Agile Web Development with Rails_. It seemed well written and to answer the request for something to get him started writing web applications. The book _Learning PHP_ didn't look bad either, but I wasn't sure if it was up to date enough, and Ruby looks like a much more interesting language.

Still I'm uncomfortable with the decision. It seems like Rails won over various Perl frameworks, even with me, largely because authors who are important in the community and qualified to write a good book present it as if you could learn the language and the framework all in one go. I'm sure Randall Schwartz, Lincoln Stein, and Damian Conway could get together, pick one of the frameworks and mix it in with some subset of Learning Perl, throwing in a superficial mention of "agile" and "restful" concepts and have an equivalent book. It would probably be a good marketing exercise for Perl, in a way, if they could stomach the idea of pushing everyone down one single path.

He'll probably like the book, though. It looks mostly good, just a little overambitious. Oh, and not nearly as much fun as Land of Lisp, which will soon go to print, but he's too serious to appreciate that.
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