Interesting article over at Tim O'Reilly's site:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/12/ruby_book_sales_surpass_python.html
There's a fair bit of discussion about Rails and the Python web
frameworks (including our own).
I'll have more to say on this topic soon.
1) Python's inherent documentation is superb in almost every way. Guido and the team should be awarded the QA Medal of Honor for the high quality of the documentation. True, there are warts *cough*urllib2*cough* but overall it is excellent. I bought one Python book (the O'Reilly Quick Reference) and promptly put it in a desk drawer. It wasn't needed.
2) I use (1) to illustrate this: it is not, in my mind, a virtue of something that more books are written about how to use it than something else. This is not to say that Ruby books are proliferating because Ruby is hard to use - I haven't looked at Ruby so I'm no valid judge of this. This is also not to say that that is NOT the case.
In a conversation with one of the many authors of another popular network framework, I was told that I should buy the book that was just about to come out. I observed that I thought it was a shame that I would NEED to in order to get reasonable use out of the code.
Spend some time programming Java, and you will not be puzzled why there are so many books about how to program Java. You'll wonder why there are so few.
Obviously, the above doesn't consider that Ruby and Rails are joined at the hip; a book about Ruby is far more likely to be a book about Rails, these days. We don't have any "one right to rule them all" in Python as of yet, and maybe we won't (I myself favor that).
One thing I worry about is whether all this talk about Ruby/Rails will make Python people want Python to be Ruby instead.
--
"Things fall apart. The Center cannot hold."
- Life as a QA geek, in a nutshell.
Best,
Jeff
