Chris Pine’s Learn To Program is a book that lives up to the promise of the title. Aimed at the complete programming novice, it guides the reader through the perils, pitfalls and (with a bit of luck) pleasures of programming.

The author’s choice of language is Ruby; this may, at first sight, seem somewhat eccentric. After all, Ruby is not exactly a ‘mainstream’ language (yet?). To be blunt, there are far more C++ and Java programmers in the world than there are Ruby programmers.

In fact, there is a good case for using Ruby as a language for novice coders. To justify his choice, the author compares a simple ‘Hello world’ written in Java…

public class HelloWorld {
   public static void main(String []args) {
      System.out.println(“Hello world”);
   }
}

…with its equivalent in Ruby:

puts 'Hello world'

The book starts out with a very gentle introduction to programming. Chapters Two and Three show you how to add numbers and displaying text on screen. It is only in chapter Four that the concepts of variables and assignment are introduced. For some readers the tempo may be a bit too sedate for comfort. However, the pace does accelerate a bit as the book progresses.

Over fifteen chapters, the reader is shown how to write methods, iterate over the items in an array, create simple class hierarchies, save and load files and even gets to grips with Ruby’s blocks and Procs (‘nameless functions’) which are, in my view, pretty tricky to explain even to an experienced programmer!

On the whole, Chris Pine’s book does a good job of teaching a complete novice how to do some real programming. You need to be aware of its limitations, however. While it address concepts and constructs which are common to most programming languages – such as variables, parameters, functions/methods and recursion – it deals only with the specifics of one language: Ruby. It does not offer much guidance on how readers may apply their newly-learned skills to more widely used languages such as VB, C# or Java. Nor does it make any attempt to grapple with the more difficult problems of Ruby such as mixins, singleton methods, block precedence and scoping. One other deficiency is that the book lacks an index. True, it is only about 150 pages long so finding information may not be too difficult. All the same, an index would have been nice.

To help you decide whether it is likely to appeal to you, I recommend that you browse through the first edition of the book which the author has, very generously, made freely available on his web site: http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/. The printed book is an expanded version of the online tutorial.

You can buy this book at a discount from Computer Manuals (UK).

Huw Collingbourne

May 2006