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Old 27th October 2010
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by thirdm View Post
I'll advocate Perl...
Just to add some perspective, Perl5 is essentially mature as a platform. Unfortunately, many equate "mature" with "dead". While I understand the rationale, Perl can be a highly productive environment because the tools are there & the third party library repository (CPAN) is very rich. The question, as with all tools, is knowing how to effectively use them.
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The client side books might be good, but he asked for something web and linux related...
Attempting to look at this from a Windows perspective, the Microsoft world offers IIS & ASP. If that is what he is getting at when saying "Linux-related", I would suggest looking at Web server books, & here's a few:I don't have the highest opinion (yet) of Packt's publishing style as editing seems to to be wanting much of the time. However, they tend to have titles on obscure subjects that other publishers haven't touched.
Quote:
...but somehow I got the impression it was on decline after it's pinnacle a couple years ago, more so than Perl.
Supposedly, Ruby is bigger in other parts of the world. Here in the US, it hasn't blossomed past Rails. I suspect this is partially because of Guido van Rossum (Python's developer) now being at Google.
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I have trouble giving a book with _Agile_ in the title a fair chance.
Understood, but this is the best Rails title I have found.
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This is a better book than David Black's _Ruby for Rails_?
From what I recall, yes. Black comes at Rails from "What of the Ruby language do I need to know?" whereas Thomas comes at it from "What does the framework do for me?" Web people find the latter more relevant.
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Some of the reviews make it sound like it's not a first book for Ruby or Rails.
Thomas was my first Rails title, & I think that is where it should be. I am discounting titles attempting to explain how to turn a computer on first. I'm beyond that, & I suspect your brother-in-law is too.
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Maybe in combination with David Flanagan's and Matz's _The Ruby Programming Language_?
  • Flanagan's Javascript book is one of the best in a field of really bad alternatives.
  • Flanagan & Matz's The Ruby Programming Language I too find to be a solid language book, but a Web head might not be as enamored with it since it is just that -- a language book.
Lastly, as for discounting CSS as a client-side technology, this isn't entirely fair & it ignores what is still required from the server-side. Too much effort has been put into structuring the HTML shipped over the wire. CSS alleviates much of this pain, so CSS should be considered from the beginning at the time of design, not simply as a technology facilitating eye candy. Plus, moving presentation to CSS can reduce the amount of HTML shipped over the wire ~40%.

Another aspect of Web development is how information is stored. If you want to consider database titles as well, let me know.
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