I've spent my bus ride this week reading through The Best Software Writing I, which consists of a bunch of weblogs and essays that have been selected and introduced by Joel Spolsky. I'm a big fan of Joel's writing and overall beliefs when it comes to software development, so I figured the book would be worth my time. While the entire book is worth reading, I'd have to say that the last entry, which is titled A Quick (And Hopefully Painless) Ride Through Ruby (With Cartoon Foxes), is by far the most entertaining piece of writing on software development that I've ever come across.
The first indication of this article's uniqueness has to be the fact that the author's name is given as 'why the lucky stiff'. While I'm still unsure of what that means, I do know that I learned more about Ruby in the 15 minutes I spent reading this article then I did in a week working through the tutorial in the Agile Web Development with Rails book. The cartoon idea has been used successfully before, like in the Head First Java series of books (which I happen to love by the way,) but this article really brings it to the next level. Here, we are crossing the line into politically incorrect software writing, and I believe the result is fabulous and incredibly effective.
I was overjoyed to learn that the selection I was reading is just the first chapter of a work in progress that's available here. The author (whose name I still do not know,) also has a weblog. It would be worth your while to add it to your collection of RSS feeds.