Tammy and Tim have a chat with Chris Pine, author of Learn to Program, about his journey to becoming a Pragmatic author.

* Recorded 10-February-2021

Show Links

• Chris Pine on Twitter
• Learn to Program
• Sourcegraph
• Alan Watts, Out of Your Mind (Part 1)
• Alan Watts, Out of Your Mind (Part 2)
• Programming Ruby (2nd edition)

Tim and Tammy are back with another episode of the Pragmatic Hero's Journey podcast. This month, our hosts chat with Chris Pine, author of Learn to Program. From tiny houses to huge programming concepts and everything in-between, this episode has it all.

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Chris Pine started his Hero's Journey in 2002 when he thought about using Ruby to teach people how to program. There wasn't much Ruby documentation for beginners at the time, so he decided to stop thinking about teaching and start writing a tutorial aimed at beginners.

But the task of writing a great tutorial for non-programmers was a bit more challenging than Chris first anticipated. But, he kept at it---adding more and more polish with each revision. Because Chris made it so easy for people to contact him, he was able to rework the tutorial based on reader feedback.

Just as Chris was ready to wrap up the tutorial writing, he was contacted by a handful of publishers, including the Pragmatic Bookshelf---he's been with us ever since and is now working on the 3rd edition of Learn to Program, which is currently in beta.

Listen to the rest of Chris's story on this episode of the Pragmatic Hero's Journey podcast.

You can stream the episode here: https://pragprog.libsyn.com/ or subscribe to the RSS feed using the following link: https://pragprog.libsyn.com/rss.