Crystal for non Rubyist?

Learning Resources
21

I’m the kinda guy that learned most languages by starting with the language specification, so I’m not much help in book suggestions.

You don’t need to learn Ruby to learn Crystal, however, when you start learning Crystal, Ruby might be handy to have around. Using it to solve small scripting problems will get the common syntax under your skin. While the details of the languages differ, they still have a common frame of mind. Gives you much more millage in the Crystal/Ruby mindset than when you hack something together in Lua/JavaScript/Bash/Lisp/whatever.

3 Likes
22

you shouldn’t need to read a Ruby book. Just take the Crystal one

OK, we don’t need to read a Ruby book, but if we want to?

Mats’s book (er, if it’s still Mats’s book) was recommended in this thread. If none stands out in hewing most closely to Crystal, that’ll do.

23

If Mats’s byline weren’t on the O’Reilly book, would it still be your recommendation over, say, the ‘pickax’?

24

forI don’t know, i read almost all Ruby books, at least, the earlier. (Those books publish before 2017?)

But, The Ruby Programming Language is my first native language(Chinese) Book, i still consider almost all my Ruby skill come from this book, all latter book just some polish, for my 10 years in Ruby, it is unique, skills learn from this book, help me a lot when learning Crystal, in fact, it’s fairly easy to get started.

Sure, many things changes since than, especially for learning Crystal, but, the key point never changes, Crystal stands on Ruby’s shoulders and fixes most bad decisions from ruby, you probably don’t need read though the book, but this book should have any things you need.