Attempts to learn Ruby

Long time since I seriously looked at a programming language. I was thinking of which one to select. Given all the hype around Ruby, I thought of studying Ruby in a structured way. Why I say "structured" is, because I have had enough dabbling experience with Ruby already. 

So, I came across this very interesting construct called "symbols" in ruby. It is just like a variable, a name that starts with a colon - ':'

For a clear understanding I read through a lot of forums about symbols, and all I found is that this is a very confusing idea for new comers. As you can see, Ruby symbols generated a 100+ post thread on the ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org mailing list - and some of them are really heated.

Anyway, my take for now about symbols is:

In ruby, if you say, "some double quoted string" a thousand times, ruby creates different objects for it. But if you use a "Symbol"-ised reference to it, as :"Some double quoted string", it is a symbol and it is created only once. This seems to be useful in places where you create hashes.

Anyway, I agree, this is not a very satisfying explanation of Symbols(or at least their usage). But for a Ruby newbie, this should hold good enough.

Status changed!

One month, and now, I am married. So, that explains the 1 month long silence! more to come soon..

Hm! I had been very busy this week, did not get enough time to check my new mac book pro out. First, I was away in NYC on the weekend. The visit bled over to Monday and I was late to get to work, and the usual snafu followed. Anyway, here are my first impressions of mac book pro and OS X

Ups

• Ease of use - things just work (may be it is so in Windows too;but prolonged use of Linux makes me say this)
• Beauty - everything is beautiful
• Scrollpad - very very very innovative way of user input
• Speed - very fast, and very smooth graphics
• Very sleek

Downs

• Heat - the core duo gets hotter and the SMC fans wont cool it down until it is really hot. I can not think of using this in a country like India.
• Font rendering - I find Apple's font rendering ( sub-pixel smoothed) a little inferior to Microsoft's Cleartype.