November 14 2008
While researching Ruby's new-in-1.9 Object methods untrusted?, untrust, and trust, I discovered something I did not know about the $SAFE variable: in addition to being Thread-local, it is also Proc-local. Proc objects (both procs and lambdas) have their own... read moreNovember 06 2008
President-elect Obama sure writes and delivers a great speech! My favorite line from his victory speech last night: put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day. I... read moreOctober 28 2008
I've migrated my site to a new webhost, and am now trying to upgrade my blogging software... Comments are broken, and other stuff is too!... read moreOctober 28 2008
The comments on my last post about method chaining in JavaScript were spectacular, and I want to publicly thank all who took the time to read my code and think about it. The final version of the code (which you... read moreMethod chaining in JavaScript inheritance hierarchies
October 28 2008
In the 5th edition of my JavaScript book I made the embarrassing mistake of recommending a constructor and method chaining technique that only works for shallow class hierarchies--it works when class B extends A, for example, but not when... read moreOctober 28 2008
The Ruby Programming Language has been gratifyingly well received by readers and reviewers. In addition to glowing reviews at rubyinside.com and slashdot.org, it has been reviewed ten times at amazon.com and I proud to say that all ten reviews... read moreOctober 28 2008
I've put together a list of 81 errors and updates to my Ruby book. These are fixed in the next printing. If you already own a copy of the book, however, you can go through and enter the changes... read moreOctober 28 2008
The Ruby Programming Language is going to be reprinted next week, and O'Reilly has given me SVN write access to the docbook files to fix typos, errors, etc. I've got a list of about 25 relatively minor erros that... read moreWill C++ get Closures before Java does?
October 28 2008
I just read that closures are being added to C++ [PDF link]. A note to Sun: you know your language is falling embarrassingly behind if the C++ standards committee can move more nimbly than you can! (For those who... read moreOctober 28 2008
Tomorrow marks the 5th anniversary of Bush's war with Iraq. The costs: 3990 US soldiers dead That is more than 2 per day. 20,416 US soldiers wounded (badly enough to require air transport). That's more than 11 per day.... read moreOctober 28 2008
If you arrived here after reading slashdot's review of The Ruby Programming Language, you've come to the right place. Thanks, Brian, for the kind words! The post below includes links to the book's table of contents and to an... read moreOctober 28 2008
The Ruby Programming Language is finally in stock and shipping from online booksellers! Press Release: actually quite a good overview of the book, who it is for and the niche it hopes to fill. Preview: an interactive table-of-contents, with... read moreOctober 28 2008
I've just discovered that the O'Reilly website now displays a browsable table of contents that allows you to preview the start of each chapter and each section of my book. In other book news, Amazon is still listing the... read moreExamples from my Ruby book now online
October 28 2008
All the example code from my Ruby book is now available for download. As I've mentioned before, you can also browse the book's table of contents.... read moreLast day for Amazon's pre-order discount
October 28 2008
Amazon continues to say that my Ruby book will be in stock tomorrow. So today is the last day that you can pre-order the book and save an additional 5% on it. As I type this, they're listing it... read more