DISQUS

I\'m still not convinced of DVCS over say central ones like Subversion. I just put together a list of free Git and Mercurial hosts (http://www.straw-dogs.co.uk/04/06/git-and-mercu...) and plan on trying them out but so far not seeing why they\'re necessary until you have larger teams of geographically distributed people.

My point stands. Popularity is not an indicator of quality.
Hitler was popular - he wasn't exactly the greatest leader of the past Century.

Treating Dave Thomas like a saint is ridiculous. He's a businessman who saw an opportunity to release an English-language book on a subject he believed would take off.

Even his making of the first edition free was nothing more than a marketing tool to explode the uptake of Ruby and therefore increase sales of the second edition.

I've said before and I'll say it again: Pickaxe is overrated. You only have to look at other similar titles for other languages to realise that.

I think the reason Pickaxe got away with it is the number of Ruby books at the time of its initial release was quite small.

Pickaxe is half ruby documentation and half sloppy tutorials. Waste of time and money.

Pointing to the popularity of a book is irrelevant as we all know 'the masses' are idiotic.