A Conversation With Mark Bates About How To Learn CoffeeScript

Mark's latest book was just published by Addison-Wesley

I’d heard second hand for a long time that Mark Bates was a great public speaker, but it wasn’t until the March meeting of Boston.rb that I had a chance to find out for myself. He gave a great presentation called Testing Rich Client Side Apps with Jasmine, about how to use Jasmine and other tools to test web applications that use CoffeeScript on the client. It was informative, entertaining and thought provoking. Despite being an experienced Ruby developer I’d never taken the time to learn how to use CoffeeScript properly in my applications. But listening to Mark and seeing his examples inspired me; I thought to myself: “This is something I need to learn and use as soon as possible.”

I was excited a few weeks later when I had a chance to interview Mark myself - what better way to get started learning CoffeeScript! First I took the time to read his book, Programming in CoffeeScript, which was fantastic and very helpful. Then we spent about an hour talking about CoffeeScript: how it was invented, what other languages inspired and influenced CoffeeScript, how a Ruby developer should start to learn it, testing and more… you can read our conversation over on RubySource.com. If you’re a Ruby developer interested in learning more about CoffeeScript here’s your chance to hear from a well known developer, author and thought leader about how to get started.