Crossing Bleecker and Lafayette through a snowstorm

Back when I wrote my “Coding for Journalists 101″ guide about a year and a half ago, I barely realized how useful code could be as a journalistic tool. Since then, after the Dollars for Docs project at ProPublica and various other programming adventures, I’ve become a slightly better coder and even more adamant that programming is basically a necessity for anyone who cares about understanding and communicating about the world in a quantitative, meaningful way.

The world of data has exploded in the past few years without a corresponding increase in the people or tools to efficiently make sense of it. And so I’ve had a hankering to create a more cohesive, useful programming guide aimed at not just journalists, but for anyone in any field.

It’s called the Bastards Book of Ruby. It’s not really just about Ruby and “bastards” was a working title that I came up with but never got around to changing. But it seems to work for now.

As I was writing the introduction (“Programming is for Anyone“), I came across this Steve Jobs interview with Fresh Air. He says pretty much exactly what I’m thinking, but he said it 15 years ago — surprising given that the Web was in its infancy and Jobs’s fame was largely out of making computers brain-dead simple for people. He wasn’t much of a programmer, but he really was a genius at understanding the bigger picture of what he himself only dabbled in:

“In my perspective … science and computer science is a liberal art, it’s something everyone should know how to use, at least, and harness in their life. It’s not something that should be relegated to 5 percent of the population over in the corner. It’s something that everybody should be exposed to and everyone should have mastery of to some extent, and that’s how we viewed computation and these computation devices.”

Bastards Book of Ruby. It’s just a rough draft but already numbers at 75,000 words. See the table of contents.

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