Customer Reviews

The Ruby Way

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Mr Fulton has written an excellent book on the Ruby programming language. It contains 478pp of body plus a few useful appendices, and covers a broad range of useful and interesting topics in a mature way, which is a great achievement considering the relative immaturity of Ruby documentation in English.

By assuming an intermediate knowledge of programming in general and basic knowledge of Ruby, the author is able to focus on breadth of subject matter rather than depth. This fact, and the task-based format of the book means that the curious reader will be immensely satisfied. It has a unique ability to make you productive with your current skill level, while also broadening your knowledge.

As noted, depth is sacrificed for breadth, and this is shown in the nature of the examples. They are frequently, as the author frankly admits, contrived. No matter, they demonstrate the appropriate point, and then move on. Experienced programmers will not suffer for this; inexperienced ones would be best advised to read another book first, but don't forget this one. Hopefully a "Ruby Cookbook" (similar to Perl's) will be published soon.

Interested readers will benefit greatly from looking at the Table of Contents, available through Amazon. "Ruby in Review" tells you all you need to know about the language, even if you thought you knew it all. "Simple Data Tasks" give you easy ways to perform all sorts of tricks with strings, regexes, numbers, times and dates. "Manipulating Structured Data" exposes Arrays and Hashes, and covers stacks, queues, trees and graphs as well. Extremely practical information, delivered at breakneck speed. "External Data Manipulation" tells you almost everything you want to know about files, pipes and object persistence. The brilliant chapter "OOP and Dynamicity in Ruby" leaves your head spinning as the wierd and wonderful capabilities of this language are demonstrated, blow by blow.

Following are four chapters on more specific subjects: GUIs, threads, system administration, and network/web programming. The first two would really benefit from some more interesting examples, but the last two again show just how easy it is to achieve things with Ruby.

"The Ruby Way" suffers from many typographical, formatting and even a few code errors, which is unfortunately what I expect from SAMS books. This would generally cause me to withhold a 5-star rating; however the unique achievement of producing such an interesting and useful book - being the first of its kind for Ruby - forces me to overlook this. It is simply too important to get this information out NOW.

It immediately gave my Ruby productivity an enormous boost, and was more fun to read than almost any other computer book. I hope Mr Fulton will write more books in future. He has obviously put in a huge effort for "The Ruby Way". It's a shame his publisher didn't reciprocate.

This book is a bit more advanced than the "Dave & Andy" book(Programming Ruby), but is well worth getting, whether as your first or second Ruby book. I has an amazing collection of simple but extremely useful "How to do (your common algorithm here)" pages that are a godsend to intermediate programmers like me. It also has a wealth of insight into advanced and esoteric language aspects. As a scientist, I really appreciated the author's objective and deep analysis of language topics. This is one of the best language books I've ever bought. If you're not comfortable reading about OO language topics, or if you're fairly new to computer languages in general, consider buying the "Programming Ruby" book as well, or instead. It's a more gentle introduction, and a great book, too.

I had previously read the fine book: Programming Ruby by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt, but didn't learn enough that I could apply Ruby without a struggle. This book flattened the learning curve just enough that it made writing useful Ruby code fun. The examples are excellent. The writing is clear. If you want to learn Ruby buy this book.

The Ruby Way is actually more of a cookbook, containing numerous code examples for using Ruby to accomplish little tasks, and so highlighting the features and capabilities of the language. As the author points out, this is not a book for the absolute beginner, although folks who have some scripting experience and an awareness of the object-orientedness of Ruby (and know what that means) will be able to figure alot out just by reading the code examples.

In such a large volume, Fulton is able to explore subjects at greater depth than some of the other Ruby books. He discusses object persistence, code that can introspectively examine it's own execution, Ruby and GUIs and even small chapters for Perl and Python users. This book helps the new Ruby scripters to become more comfortable with solving problems using Ruby's strengths.

This book is very good. It covers a lot of important and interesting topics like Ruby's OOP featurs, Gtk+, Fox, Threads, Network Programming and more.
The Text is easy to follow and the examples are also easy to understand. Most of the stuff is presented in a "How do I XYZ" manner which makes the book ideal for looking up all the things a Ruby programmer needs while working with this wonderful programming language. In my opionon a must have for any Ruby Fan.

I've been writing C and C++ code for years and have dabbled in shell, perl, and Tcl scripting. As I begin to look into Ruby, I'm finding this book to be extremely helpful. I prefer to learn new languages by example, and this book has tons of them. Highly recommended.

I would have liked this book in the first few week or two when I was just learning Ruby, but I got this book after I had hacked some thousand lines of Ruby and read Dave Thomas's PickAxe II, and thus did not end up finding this book to be very useful.

This would be good to lend to a "Ruby nuby" but overall seems to lack true depth. Nevertheless, it's a handy guide for beginners who would like a cookbook style baedeker.

The zippy stone works its magic. For the past few months i have been wanting to learn Ruby and when i browsed through this book in the book shop, i decided that i needn't wait any longer. Ever since then i have been reading this book in the subway, on my way to and forth from work. . I give this book 5 stars 'coz its an excellent tool for those entering the Ruby world. I am eagerly waiting for updates, cookbooks, pocket books and learning books.

A great book on Ruby. It's getting a bit long in the tooth, but it's still well worth the time and money. I keep hearing rumours of a second edition ... PLEASE!

The book is poorly organized. Information is incompleted.
You would have a lot of question marks in your head
after reading the book.

I was misled by those positive comments from amazon.

The "Pragmatic" book is much much better.