I've been trying to knock back a few more books before teched, since I know after teched I'll probably be too immersed in 2.0 to really think about anything else. One of the favorite topics right now is Ruby. For those that don't know, Ruby is a dynamicly typed, fully OO interpreted language, with an ever growing community pumping out great libraries. I'm really enjoying learning how to do things the ruby way, and trying to grok all of Rails. On that front, I have been reading everything here, the pragmatic "pickaxe 2", and four days on rails. The pickaxe is a pretty big book (think almost tome), but is written in a very easy to read and follow manner, making it a cover to appendix read. Expect more and more on Ruby as I learn enough to actually speak intelligently on it.

The other book I've been reading is Head First Design Patterns. I've read a number of design patterns books, and although I've always felt I knew them pretty well, I never fully groked many of the patterns as far as the whys and whens. This book covers the whys and whens, and does so in a very fun and easy to follow manner. The book was written for Java, but I have had no issues following along so far. I think this may end up being one of my favorite books of all time, right behind Applied .net, and I'm sure I'll be scouting out more Head First books.

Hopefully I'll get more posts up here soon. I find it hard to post when I'm in a learning cycle since I don't want to post half baked concepts or ideas, but maybe I should as it may help others down the paths I'm heading. Maybe I'll post up some of my Ruby tests later this week and start a Ruby for .neters column. In any case, expect full book reviews of those two coming soon, as well as Zeldman's designing with web standards, which I also recently finished up.