What we can learn from "_why" the long lost open source developer

Code might not last forever, but _why proves you can have an impact that outlives your work.why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby is different. It's chock-full of comic strips, strange digressions, and seemingly off-topic sidebars. Cartoon foxes offer peanut-gallery style commentary to the text. A strip about an elf and his pet ham provide increasingly strange problems for code examples. As the guide unfolds, the book's prose plays off the strips, and vice versa, until the author writes himself in, disguised as a rabbit, and bounds off the page. Needless to say, it's an unusual way to write a book about computer programming. But it's anything but boring.