Ruby School Dropout

One of the books I'm working my way through right now is Beginning Ruby on Rails by Steve Holzner, PhD. I didn't do much research on what to start with. I just walked in to Barnes and Noble and decided that I'd go with the best of the books they happened to have on hand at the time. I flipped to the Introduction, and sure enough the book told me it's for me: "This book is for anyone who wants to develop online applications using Ruby and Rails. All you have to know is HTML to read this book profitably."

Check.

And so far, so good. I hit my first intellectual snag at the end of the second chapter, and that will be the subject of my very next entry here. Maybe you can help.

One thing that's bugging me about the book is that the author uses limp, uninteresting example text and variables throughout the first couple of chapters -- lots of "hello world" and "apples, oranges, and pears." Maybe his sense of humor doesn't match mine, or maybe he's just not letting his personality come through in his examples. You know, to keep the reader's attention. Through two chapters I've said hello from Ruby, said hello to my sweetie, and said hello in the style of bad John Wayne impressions. I've counted vegetables and checked the temperature to see if it would be appropriate for a picnic several times and in a number of ways. I understand the teaching method of using the same text through several examples, to help highlight how different approaches can accomplish the same results, but I wouldn't mind something other than salutations and the weather every once in a while. The tradition of making "hello, world" the first piece of code you write in a new language isn't lost on me, but that should only be example 1.