Errata for Learn to Program, 2nd Edition

#40562: Hello,

It's called "escaping" because, in the old days, it caused the compiler to escape from the normal processing of characters. which was one at a time in a loop and would lead to the undesired result. The escape character would cause additional processing to kick in.

(In the old days, when computers were much slower and had much less memory, compile time was a critical marketing point. Hence anything to simplify the compiler would improve sales.)

Good Luck. Good Book!--Don Altman

#37890: The book asks to list which methods were learned in chapters 1-5 as:
puts
gets
chomp
conversions (.to_s, .to_i, .to_f)
arithmetic (+,-,*,/)

But what about an escape? What does it count as? Maybe it would be worth adding a blurb about escapes in this section.

Awesome book, thanks!--Steve

#37891: Regarding the first examples starting with:
puts 5.+ 5
puts('hello '.+ 'world')
puts((10.* 9).+ 9)

Can you please clarify why simply removing the dot from .+ allows all the above examples to execute without the "warning: parenthesize argument(s) for future version"?

I understand every method is being done by some object, even if it doesn’t have a dot in front of it along with the 5 * 'pig' problem but why does removing the dot to the left of the method + allow the method puts and the string/integer objects to execute without the warning above?

I understand the concept of implicit objects and the variable "self" as explained but I'm still confused with the examples above for the reasons described...

Thank you!

#38665: Setting aside the fact that the recursion chapter melted my brain, there were two things unexplained by the author in the continent_size example that would have helped a lot:

1.) There's no explanation of how Ruby handles arrays inside arrays anywhere else in the book, so explaining why you use [y][x] and xy would have helped a lot.
2.) Having the "little guys" fall off the edge of the map returns "nil". This did not become obvious until a friend pointed it out, and I was finally able to solve the bug.--Brandon Hays

#41082: For those readers unfamilar with the world of computer games, the references and exercizes related to the game "Civilization III" are annoying and obtuse. Such a reader does not want to have to grok the minutia of this game, which the reader has no previous interest in, for the sake of completing the exercize. For future versions of the book, please do your readers a favor and rework the examples with something more universal. --Cosmo Lee

#41930: It would be nice to add just one more version of this example with
if name[0] == ?C
changed to
if name[0,1] == C
in order to illustrate the first method you mention of getting a substring. --John M Miller