Customer Reviews

Ruby Programming for the Absolute Beginner

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

 

 

I bought this book to get a better understanding of how to write classes, handle exceptions, and use the debugger. I achieved all three, so I suppose that I got my $24 worth.

The idea of the book is a dumbed down approach to Ruby, so that any beginner can understand it. Unfortunately, it is dumbed down so far that the beginner will not be much wiser at the end of the book. I disagree with the author's approach. The difficulty of most beginners is not inability to understand syntax, but lack of knowledge of computer science. The author does little to help, preferring to give example after repetitive example.

The editing of this book is one of the sloppiest I have ever seen in a commercial book. All the errors were in code, not in the text; therefore, it is the author who let us down, not the publisher. On page 118, the author explains that you can use the colon (:) instead of the "then" keyword in a case statement. However, the "then" keyword is not used in case statements (unless you adopt the poor form of putting the entire case statement on one line). On page 122, we read about "x|| or x ||0" and "x|| yyx||0" as examples of the OR operator. These are such bad typographical errors that I have not yet been able to guess what the author meant. On page 49, we read (as an example of Ruby calculations) that 0*7*4/3-4%3+8 will return 16. It doesn't and it shouldn't. The expression equals 7.

The author frequently cuts and pastes whole sections to repeat them, often forgetting to change those texts that need to be changed. Thus we find the greeting for the 8-ball game in the middle of the Typing Challenge. And the example of the "while" modifier cut and pasted to be an example of the "until" modifier (the example has reads "while" instead of "until".) We read that the ? modifier "matches zero or none [should be 'one'] of the preceding characters." The book is full of screen captures which are too small to see, and which provide no useful information.

All of this shows lack of attention to detail by the author. The book is so dumbed down, however, that it will not hinder the reader. On page 90, we read about converting strings to floating point numbers with the "tp_f" method. That may hinder the reader. The correct method is "to_f".

An irritation: the author makes self-conscious use of sexist pronouns throughout. I thought we were past that stage.

If you need a beginning Ruby book, start with beginner's tutorials on the internet, then get Peter Cooper's Beginning Ruby from Novice to Professional. Same price as this book, much, much more value.

I disagree with the reviewers who gave this book only one star. In my opinion, the book fulfills its obligation by providing a clear and concise introduction to Ruby for the beginners. Ruby is a popular scripting language used in many test automation tools, for example, Watir and Selenium. As a QA Manager, I was looking for a book that I could recommend to my team who has no experience with Ruby. This book is my choice for them. It covers basic syntax of Ruby in a good structured manner. It's easy to follow and the examples are short and illustrative.

Now, I like the idea. Ruby is an excellent choice for teaching newcomers to programmers, and what better strategy to lure a newbie into the depths of programming than using little games as examples? Only, this grand plan is horribly spoiled by its realization. The material presented in the various chapter is definitely too sparse and insufficient even for a beginner, and the example game programs are basically the same, stale, squalid , little program that 'ask permission' to start, gather some inputs, spits some output and says bye bye and thanks before closing.The same code is presented over and over with maniacal repetition, even the comments and few "puts line" that invariably greet the poor player at the beginning of every script. Sickening. I think the right subtitle is not "No experience required" but "No skills gained".

If you want to learn Ruby I think the mandatory text is:

The Ruby Programming Language by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto

Here you have an author who;s has proved himself writing some of the most useful Java books ever written and the author of the language. What more can you wish for? If you, really, really (but really.. it's not a difficult book to master...) find it a bit too intimidating, maybe give a read first to the Apress "Beginning Ruby" book.

I read this book over the course of 2 weekends. It is well written and easy to follow. The author goes into great detail to explain how things work and to help you build up your foundation. The end of chapter projects are all based on the development of games, which is not easy to do with a langauge like Ruby. Still, I think the author pulled it off quite well.

The author likes to add opening and closing messages to every game which seems unncessary after one or two instannces. However, his consistency helps to ensure that each project stands on its own (just in case you like to jump around instead of reading the book from cover to cover. Overall, the book suited my needs well. I recommend it to anyone who is just starting out.

If you want to learn to program in Ruby, get a different book. The target audience for this book should be a) new programmers looking for a reason to program, and b) programmers looking for a reason to use Ruby. This helps neither.

Each chapter shows you how to write one complete program, which is good. However, the examples could have been written in BASIC in 1980. The ruby idioms are few and forced. Example: each and every program in the book has a method cls in class Screen (or class Console_Screen, for variety) that reads: puts ("\n" * 25).

In chapter 9, the author apparently does not know that you can use forward slashes for directories in Ruby on Windows. In chapter 10, the final chapter, you learn how to write a console tic-tac-toe game with debugging using begin/rescue statements.

The book does include irb, hashes and arrays, collections, and regular expressions. It does not include gems, Rails, unit testing, test-driven development, anything web-related, or graphics. Aside from begin/rescue and regular expressions, almost all of the programming uses techniques in use in Apple II Basic or before.

The most valuable part of the book is Appendix A, where the recommended reading book list includes Programming Ruby, The Ruby Way, Ruby Cookbook and Agile Web Development with Rails. Buy any or all of these books. The first ten chapters of Programming Ruby, by Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler, and Andy Hunt, covers everything in this book in 220 fewer pages.