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This book is aimed at Ruby programmers who have already mastered the basics and want to learn higher level techniques.
Practical Ruby Projects presents 9 diverse projects (including a turn-based adventure game, and a generative music creator) that will teach new and innovative techniques in a learn-by-example fashion. While there are many other Ruby titles, none of them take this unique project-based approach to teaching.
Topher Cyll is a software engineer and writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Williams College and works for a small Boston-area startup.
In reverse alphabetical order, he finds programming languages, music, Free Software, education, bioengineering and beer terribly exciting.
Topher loves Ruby not only for the language itself, but also the light-hearted and intellectually curious community that surrounds it.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Finally a book for experienced Ruby developers,
By
This review is from: Practical Ruby Projects: Ideas for the Eclectic Programmer (Books for Professionals by Professionals) (Paperback)
The past few years have seen the English-language Ruby book market explode. Before the phenomenal success of Rails it was perfectly possible to own every available title (and not use much storage space), but now that would be quite a challenge and lead to considerable redundancy. Having worked my way through quite a few Rails books of late, reading Practical Ruby Projects--a Ruby book that doesn't even mention web frameworks--was both a pleasant diversion and a highly illuminating experience.
Like the last volume I reviewed (Pro JavaScript Design Patterns), this book is unabashedly aimed at experienced programmers. There's a brief paragraph on "getting set up", but no detailed guide to obtaining the tools. Instead we dive right in to a sequence of projects that includes: making music (dipping into calling C code from ruby), animation, simulation, building a strategy game (and adding a RubyCocoa frontend), genetic algorithms, and even implementing lisp and parsers. Once again the "apress roadmap," a diagram intended to show how the skillsets in their different volumes build on one another, is misleading pitching this between "Beginning Ruby" and other volumes I've reviewed like Practical Ruby for System Administration and Pro Active Record. Don't believe it. Though there's little overlap in the material, this is a more advanced volume than either of those and readers should be prepared. The pace of the book is measured and Topher Cyll does a good job of gradually building up the projects a step at a time. Along the way a variety of practices are demonstrated with many methods stubbed out for demonstration purposes before being filled in when they are needed, and considerable time spent on decoupling code. That latter piece is particularly in evidence in the chapters on building a turn-based strategy game and then developing a RubyCocoa front-end. Despite careful design early on further refactoring is needed to make it easy to apply the front-end and that process is carefully worked through. Most of the book makes some use of existing libraries. The initial lisp chapter uses the sexp library and the subsequent section on writing a parse relies on rparsec. For the most part, however, use of the libraries is kept to a minimum, allowing for fairly self-contained code. Unit testing is largely ignored until the last chapter, where the need for tests when constructing a grammar/parser is explained and a test-first development model is encouraged. That works well to demonstrate the power of tests for complex (and often brittle) code. This is not a book designed for public transport reading. Working through chapters on the bus I frequently found myself wanting to reach for my laptop to get a better grasp of how a piece of code worked. While the explanation is generally very good, with material of this complexity there is nothing like running the code and tweaking it to make sure you've understood exactly what each transformation does. It's a book to take your time over, so be prepared! A few editorial errors have crept in, suggesting a re-organisation of the contents late in the day. In particular an early reference to s-expressions seemed to presume that the lisp and/or parsing chapters were featured early. That's not a big deal and will hopefully be corrected in later printings; the author does encourage skipping around within the book, but there is value in working through it roughly in order, and not just for the two "paired" chapters that explicitly build on one another. Perhaps the most striking thing about this book is the reminder that even for those of us whose primary programming activity is web development, studying other areas can be extremely helpful. Not only is it helpful to see how other developers structure their code, but tools like genetic algorithms and parsers are likely to be very helpful where web applications require sophisticated processing and/or backend systems. And it never hurts to learn a little lisp. For the ruby developer who's comfortable with the language and wants to stretch out a little, this book would be an excellent investment. Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best Ruby Book Since "The Ruby Way",
This review is from: Practical Ruby Projects: Ideas for the Eclectic Programmer (Books for Professionals by Professionals) (Paperback)
Most Ruby books milk newbies jumping on the bandwagon for cash. This is a book for experienced Ruby programmers who want to be awesome Ruby programmers. The book of the book is all about parsing and shows you how to implement Lisp in Ruby; the first project is a compact, simple, powerful system for creating music in real time in Ruby. I'm using it to drive Propellerhead Reason from the command line and I'm on page 25. This is an absolutely excellent book. The best Ruby book I've seen in years. The only Ruby book I'd recommend to experts. This is the bomb book.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Feet first and freewheeling,
By Ian Dees (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Practical Ruby Projects: Ideas for the Eclectic Programmer (Books for Professionals by Professionals) (Paperback)
The hands-on style of this book is contagious; you'll find yourself really wanting to jump in and try out the code samples. The source is available on Topher's site, but the simplicity and sense of immediacy are such that you may want to just start typing it in yourself. In a few minutes, you're making music or creating a game.
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