Firstly, congratulations to the Crystal Core Team and community for hitting 1.0! I’m a huge fan of Ruby and Ruby-like languages and was very excited when Crystal first appeared - it’s awesome seeing it come so far!
We are starting a Programming Crystal Book Club over on Devtalk and I wondered if anyone would like to join us? (You’re welcome to make use of our discount coupon ‘devtalk.com’ to get 35% off if you like too.)
If you’re wondering what being part of a book club entails, it’s really just those taking part documenting their journey with the book and language in a shared thread and with a conversational approach. They can actually be a lot of fun and can also prove interesting for others interested in the book or language - so a great way to help the wider community and help generate buzz and excitement around a language too.
I’m actually really looking forward to the Programming Crystal book club as I am particularly interested in seeing how easy it might be for Rubyists like myself to pick up.
I hope this is the correct section for this thread and that it’s ok to post it (if not, mods please feel free to move/edit as you see fit). For everyone else, I hope some of you will enjoy reading our book club thread and it would be awesome if some of you decide to join us!
This sounds like a nice endeavour to explore the language together.
Please be aware that the Programming Crystal book is a bit dated by now. It’s based on Crystal 0.26.0 or 0.27.0 – not sure which one it is, I found contradictory statements. But the point is that the language has changed in the past 2 years.
I’d expect the book to still give a good introduction to Crystal, but some examples might not be working with 1.0 and some of the information would probably be inaccurate by now. Just keep that in mind while reading.
I’m not aware of any more-recent publications with a broad scope at introducing the language.
We’ve recently released a couple of tutorial lessons, and more are to come. But it’s by far not a complete introduction yet.
Thanks Johannes! I wonder if @simonstl (or Ivo) have written any blog posts anywhere outlining any major differences between the most recent version of Crystal and the version used in the book? Not sure how big the changes are but this can sometimes be a quicker way to bring a book back up to date :D
Thanks also for the links to the online tuts @straight-shoota! I’ve mentioned them in our book club and recommended that we go through those too
Edit: Looks like Mafinar is going to try and document any changes he comes across so hopefully that will be useful for others as well
