Ruby, a message to you

Even though it might not always be obvious, I’ve been using Ruby since 2002. I got lucky and stumbled upon it early (really early for someone who wasn’t in the software development business, insanely early for someone who was just a graduate student at an art school). When I see comments (like the first comment of this post) that say “I won’t buy a book to learn this”, I cringe. I wasn’t any good with Ruby for three years because I didn’t buy the book. I want to tell Josh, “Buy the book!”

I’ve been poor. I had practically no money throughout graduate school. My rent was $225/month in Chicago, which meant I was in a bad apartment in a bad neighborhood. I got mugged half a block from my building. The mugger got all of 75 cents from me. Not a lot of money, right? But because he got that 75 cents, I didn’t have bus fare the next day. In those days I ate mayonaise sandwiches. My (old) computer’s power supply’s fan wouldn’t start without me spinning it with my finger first. They were desperate times. And you know what? If I could go back in time and say one thing (career-related), I’d say “Buy the book!” It would have been an investment that paid off earlier, rather than later. I would have been able to afford balogna sooner.

I also would have been happier! It’s incredible how much happier you can be when you know what you’re doing. Once you take the mystery out of why things you do don’t work, you fix them faster, you get results faster, you say to yourself “Hey, I could do this for a living” faster. I still buy books. Because every time I read a book, I know more about what I’m doing, and it makes me like what I’m doing more. (It incidentally helps me make more money, if you’re in to that kind of thing.)

I recieved an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (not to be confused with the Art Institutes chain schools). After I left, some people got their novels picked up, some people (like my wife) went on to PhD programs, and most people started teaching literature and writing. I got yet another job doing tech support and tried for something better (and part of that was buying the book). The English professors at the University of Denver know, because of my wife, that I got a graduate degree in writing, and occasionally they’ll ask if I’m “getting any writing done”. And I’m not. And it doesn’t bother me. It probably wouldn’t be any good. I’ve stopped doing the things that real writers do, like read new writing. I used to read fiction all the time. It helped me when I was writing fiction. Now I read programming books for the same reason. It helps me program better. And all I have to do is buy the book.

This isn’t even really about programming. It’s about what you’re interested in. I read a lot about programming (and the languages I use). I have a cousin who reads a lot of scripts (she writes for a television show). I have a sister who reads a lot of cookbooks (she manages a restaurant). My wife reads poetry all the time. Everyone I know that really wants to be great (or even merely good) at what they do reads about it. They buy the books.

When I see someone write “[I'm] too cheap to buy a book” all I see is “I don’t care”, and that’s a really uninteresting followup comment to a blog post.