Customer Reviews

Programming Ruby: A Pragmatic Programmer's Guide

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'm very new to Ruby, but I find learning new programming languages fun and challenging. I like to dig in as quickly as possible, using what examples I can find to show me how the language works, and reading the documentation when I have to. After getting a feel for the language, I start reading the books. I don't start with books, usually, because they're often not geared for a programmer learning a second language.

But I found Programming Ruby to be an excellent starting point -- it provides the quick-start help I need by giving numerous and well thought-out examples both in the body of the text and in the reference section (see below).

The chapters are well arranged (and even include information on distributed Ruby on page 272, often where most texts just start talking about file I/O!), with the first 276 pages devoted to an introduction to the language. The last 250-or-so pages contain an excellent library reference, alphabetically arranged.

The devil is in the details, though. And here, AW put a lot of thought into the finer points. The type is clear; the typographic conventions are standard and, if you've used any other typical programmer's text, easy to follow. So far, this is what you'd expect from any good computer title. In addition, however, they have added an easy-to-use thumbtab system for the alphabetical arrangement of the reference section, so finding a particular entry is quick and easy. Each entry in the reference section is clearly laid out with a class hierarchy (including super- and subclasses), parameters, description, "Mixes in" and a list of all class methods (most (if not all) with examples and output. All well-designed not only for the experienced Ruby programmer but also for the novice.

The index is thorough, with helpful vertical lines between the columns, and the reference section entry is identified by bold page numbers.

All in all, I would highly recommend this book for new Ruby programmers. There are still a number of things I don't understand about Ruby, but this book is an excellent place to start. It sets the bar very high for future books on this new and exciting programming language.

I haven't read a book so well arranged and well written in many years! The book is now regarded the official (US) english reference on Ruby version 1.6

The pick-axe book as it is called among the ruby-fans (because of the front cover) is very well suited to beginners as well as experts. It's driven by examples that gives you a extremely good feeling of the power of Ruby. It's fun to read and excels in its unusual but still very gentle learning curve. You'll be finished with the basics of file-handling, I/O, GUI and Threads within the first quarter of the book!

The book is divided into four parts: A tutorial for newbies, a practical part on Ruby in its setting, a crystallized part with all the advanced and gory details of Ruby (for the experts), and finally the Ruby Library and Standard Library Reference. The reference is very well arranged and easy to navigate in to say at the least. You'll very quickly find yourself jumping around in the book - revisiting cool examples and trying things out for yourself.

You'll pick up Ruby in a number of few days. If you're in doubt go and have a look at www.rubycentral.com where you will find excerpts of chapters from the book, FAQ, links, articles, code snippets, etc. arranged as well as the book :-) I hear there's even been put up an on-line tutorial if you want to try Ruby out right away.

Comming from a background of C, C++, Java and Python I've found the language Ruby to beat them all. I didn't think I would need to learn another language, but with Ruby I was positively surprised.

Most of the time programming Ruby feels like designing directly in a language that supports the way you think about the problems at hand!

So what is Ruby? Here is a little shortcut list for those in a hurry: Easy to learn, high level of abstraction, interpreted, true OO, file-based source code, flexibility, convenience, metaclasses, closures/blocks, iterators, collections, mixins, continuations, threads, regular expressions, modules for patterns support, transparency, dynamic typed, easy to extend (even easier than Python), portability, light weight, easy to embed, modest in use of system resorces, but most importantly: Fun and joyful!

And thats just the surface. E.g. the authors have even used Ruby to implent parts of an X11 window manager.

It's almost as close as SmallTalk in being pure OO, while you still can make procedural programs if you want to. The simple, clean and concise syntax competes with and wins over the syntax of Python many times. It has the power of C++ while leaving out the details, that slows your development-speed down. You need less code-lines than in Java, but without the loss of clarity or readability. Many Perl-programmers or sys-admins have been shifting to Ruby because of its greater readability while still being just as expressive and powerful.

I could go on, but take a short look at www.rubycentral.com and see for yourself. Ruby's worth it.

Dennis Decker Jensen

This book is an excellent into to a very easy to use language. Ruby is much more OO than any language except Smalltalk and is much better integrated with standard UNIX/POSIX than that language. Now all we need is a reference for all the libraries and a book on XP/Rapid Development using Ruby (and the latter is what the current authors say they're working on next, although they don't explicitly mention XP that I noticed).

I give this book my highest recommendation, it is one of the best books I have read of its type (language intro). As for Ruby, if you are thinking about learning a language and want to do OO for anything except systems and embedded programming, then this is the language to look at. (for systems and embedded, OO is probably not a good idea in most cases anyhow... object-based is about the highest you'd want to go.)

This is the best book on Ruby, bar none. Far and away better than Ruby in a Nutshell, which is too terse to be useful. The introductory section provides a smooth ramp into learning Ruby, and the reference section in the back is so good that it's literally dog eared to the point of falling apart in my version. You can get this online for free, but if you are serious about learning Ruby (and you should be, because it's a great language), you should buy this book.

I read the authors' first book, _The_Pragmatic_Programmer_, earlier this year and was very impressed. I had seen some articles on Ruby on the Internet and was interested in learning more. When I saw that Hunt and Thomas had written a book on Ruby, I picked it up. I must say I'm impressed by both the book and the language. I'm not quite ready to give up Perl and Python (or even shell scripting) completely, but I am planning on adding Ruby to my programming toolbox. I highly recommend this book to any programmer who likes to learn new languages to improve their understanding of the art and science of software development.

The authors have a wonderful style for introducting the lanaguage Ruby, assuming that you have at least a small amount of prior programming experience. The order of presentation and the amount of polish throughout made this a joy to read and introduces Ruby at a very rapid, yet comfortable, pace.

It does seem to suffer from wanting to be both an introduction to Ruby and a reference manual as well; the last several chapters look (and read like) reference materials. While I'm not opposed to that, the book doesn't have the kind of binding that lets it easily lay flat on your desk open to the page, so I'm more inclined to just open the docs on a separate monitor instead. The book might as well have been lighter and just had a pointer to docs online.

Also, I wonder if some of the presentations of concepts like closures and contiuations aren't a bit too rapid for the casual reader. If you've had a programming background in Scheme or Lisp, it's old hat; however, as I was reading through their presentations and the relatively quick examples, it felt likely that many readers wouldn't get a lot of the subtelty in what was going on under the hood to make the language features work or in what kinds of real world scenarios those sorts of features are useful.

Well I have been up all night long reading 'Programming Ruby' cover to cover. I've been thinking about getting into Ruby programming for a while now, but lack of documentation and lack of time has always stopped me. However, after reading this book I am thoroughly hooked on Ruby.

Not only does the book have an excellent tutorial which goes over major Ruby concepts and the majority of the language you will encounter on a daily basis, but it also has an indispensable language and standard library reference, as well as an overview of the C API and details on the inner workings of the Ruby interpreter.

This book is definitely worth picking up if you want to start dabbling in Ruby, and is almost a requirement to have on your desk during heavy hacking sessions.

I've been using a bunch of interpreted programming languages, amongst them were awk, perl, scheme, python and I'll still use them for what they're at best, but then came Ruby (which IMHO combines the best of them all), and the book known as the pickaxe book. It's an introduction to the language, and a reference guide at the same time. It's not intended to absolute beginners, it just requires the reader to have some knowledge of classic programming languages, and some OO knowledge...

Because of the lack of adequate Ruby documentation in English (which is currently improving but may still be a ways off), this book is indispensable as a Ruby reference and as "best practice" tutorial for the language. Because of the way Ruby is designed, most programmers will find that they need to change their style a little in order to best take advantage of its features. This book helps you understand how to do this and gives you a good overall knowledge of Ruby's vast capabilities.

I guess non-programmers can read this book with benefit but having some programming background will help in appreciating the power of this language. The authors do a good job of going through Ruby's syntax and features while using OO principles to buildup on a non-trivial tutorial app. If you're a Perl/Python programmer, this book will get you up to speed quickly.