Customer Reviews

The Well-Grounded Rubyist

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

i've had a tenuous relationship w/ ruby for the past 18 months, which began when a friend sent me the 'pickaxe' and agile rails books over the 2007 holidays. that duo is widely regarded as the de facto introduction to programming with ruby on rails, however, i'd qualify that statement to perhaps only apply to working professionals coming over from another language/framework. i both 1) don't think rails is the best framework for a new ruby coder (sinatra is), and 2) don't think the Pragmatic book is the best introduction to ruby. the well-grounded rubyist didn't exist when i got started, so the first book to pique my interest was the 'beginning ruby' book by peter cooper (apress), and while i was very happy to have found that title over a year ago and having purchased several books and screencasts related to ruby since, the well-grounded rubyist is absolutely the best book to become familiar with ruby at present. the reasoning is consistent w/ my reviews of other books for other programming languages, and is such that there is /NO REPLACEMENT/ for the author being a first-rate educator. a quality instructor is somewhat selfless, always focused on presenting the subject as a first priority, and particularly not how the subject relates to themselves. most programming books are written by practitioners, and since ruby hasn't become particularly available as an option for computer-science students in most programs, there is a very definite void in regard to the number of real teachers writing texts on ruby. i had struggled against my previous experiences coding (asm) and while i learned a lot of the tactics to code in ruby over the past year and half, i never really understood 'why' things worked the way they did. whereas before reading this book i was primarily remixing other people's code, now i'm writing my own code and it feels much more natural. just as "jQuery in action" seemed to open my eyes to the world of javascript, this Manning title has finally opened up the rubiverse and to say that i'm ecstatic really just begins to do this book justice. i can't imagine that you wouldn't find this book the best place to start w/ ruby at this time ...

If you have any doubts about your Ruby knowledge, then you should read this book. After months of frustration while looking at source code and wasting time with Why's Poignant Guide, I made it a point to read through all pages of the Well-Grounded Rubyist. Once I was done, the difficulty was gone. Now I can read Rails code with ease, all the code makes sense and I feel like I entered a whole new world. David Black guides the reader through the topics he feels are most important. I resisted the temptation to put down the book and start programming, but I am glad I waited. The book is so useful that having finished it, you will be on a new level and your next task will be to learn how Ruby's powerful features can be combined into non-trivial frameworks. If you skip this book, you risk writing mediocre code, at least until you are forced to learn the features and techniques of the language...the hard way.

David Black has written a thoughtfully balanced book on Ruby basics and best practices. Thankfully, it doesn't waste a single page on things better off on a website somewhere. For example, no elaboration of differences between Ruby 1.9.1 and earlier versions. (Which are, in fact, found on the book's website!)

The book is written referencing Ruby 1.9.1. Be aware that as of this writing, there isn't a 1-click installer on the Ruby language site for 1.9.1 for Windows, and the binaries-only download doesn't include a few key DLLs. If you want to continue using 1.8.6 until an up-to-date installer comes along, the bulk of the book will still be perfectly usable, however. The last note on Windows is that there is text sprinkled throughout the book on such things as paths and other configuration minutia which is specific to Mac and Unix installs. This should not trouble the readers intended for this book in the least.

As a practical matter, since the author spends no time on basic programming concepts, you'll have to have some programming experience to take best advantage of this book. Expressed differently, there is no wasted text for its audience. As one with such experience, I found this to be a perfectly-conceived bootstrap approach to the language. Anyone already having basic OO concepts already should have no difficulty following this book (mine being Smalltalk).

The author and publisher appear to have taken great pains in the flow, layout, and editing to produce a virtually error-free work. I'm enormously appreciative of that; for its own sake, of course, but also because error-riddled computer book are all too common. There are some very minor errors posted on the book's blog on the publisher's website, but they are trivial, in my opinion (programmers are persnickety, particularly about semantics, and rightfully so).

Black's intent is to walk the reader through key aspects of the language, OO as it directly relates to Ruby, and a slice of the core library. Take note of the last comment - this is NOT a comprehensive language reference covering the entire core library. Instead, the author is trying to cover those portions of the library he deems most important to understand when learning Ruby. He succeeds. While the book starts out with the simplest of Ruby's elements, such as syntax, by the end of the volume, you're well into more advanced usages, including reflection, overriding core behavior, and more.

One of the best programming books I've bought in terms of clarity, presentation, and flow. And over 25 years, there have been a lot of them.

"The Well-grounded Rubyist" belongs to these still too rare books which deal exclusively and in-depth with Ruby, by leaving Rails, its killer app, on side. David A. Black proposes to give us a strong foundation for the comprehension of the Ruby's mechanisms. On this purpose, he adopts a didactic and original step, by presenting the concepts according to a progressive and well balanced difficulty, not following the "traditional" progression found in other books treating of computer programming languages. Thus, for example, the method lookup strategy is described in chapter 4, even before looking in detail at the test and loop instructions in chapter 6. This order, which can seem curious at first sight, appears finally perfectly logical and natural. This progressive and cumulative approach will however impose to the reader a linear reading of the book to withdraw all the benefit from it.

Focusing himself on the fundamental mechanisms of Ruby, the author only partially cover its built-in classes and modules library, in the second part of the book. After a long description of essential (predefined classes, conversion methods, enumerators etc) he devotes two whole chapters to the extensive Ruby's possibilities about I/O operations and regular expressions.

The three final chapters, which compose the third and last part of the book, treat dynamic aspects of Ruby. What would appear to be the most complex topic of the book is in fact surprisingly easy to assimilate, and one realizes that the efforts of the author to gradually lead us to a sufficient knowledge of Ruby in order to tackle without pain the most difficult subjects, bore its fruits.

This book is intended more particularly for those who discover Ruby, but will be also advantageous to more advanced Ruby developers. Thus, the talent of the author enabled me to completely understand certain of mechanisms I used without mastering them, and which I never had seen exposed anywhere so clearly. The wise advice of the author, lavished throughout the book, to make good use of the exceptional richness of Ruby will also benefit to all readers.

As good as it is, this book presents however some small defects: the author always wanting to make sure you hit the point, some explanations are slightly verbose, and its deliberate choice to not speak about the important differences occurred between Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 may annoy some readers. But these few defects are really minors in regard of the great qualities of this book, and I completely recommend it.

I, too, struggled a bit when learning Ruby. I tried the Pick Axe, Programming Ruby, Beginning Ruby, Learning Ruby... I could have saved a ton of money if I'd just had this book first. Excellent. Easy to read, but not dumbed down. I came away with a much deeper understanding of WHY oop is used, and how to use it in ruby.

If you are looking to understand ruby, look no further.

I'm a beginner at the Ruby language, having programmed in ASM,C,Java and PHP before. I've skimmed or partially read quite a few Ruby books. I settled on this book after my partial reads of the others and finding them a bit hard to grasp. The topics and syntax was just not sticking very well. Many of them seem written by programmers who know and explain the language well but don't sufficiently cover the why's/what-for's. Or they just don't seem to flow very well, from topic to topic or chapter to chapter. After reading the reviews here I started reading this book and found the style really great. At 25% through this book now, I can say I completely agree that this one is the best for someone new to Ruby. The writing style is great, like a good teacher/course and gives good insights into what's going on behind the scenes - something that i think helps the content "stick".

I wear a lot of hats in my company, including online marketing guru, video producer, and Rails developer. As I sometimes go days, or even a week, without delving into Ruby, maintaining my Ruby knowledge between programming challenges has been a challenge in and of itself. Even though I don't write code for hours every day, I need to keep up with the people who do. My training solution has been to read ten to twenty pages of The Well Grounded Rubyist every day. I'm now on my third pass through the book and I'm still learning new things. The Well Grounded Rubyist is one of the most useful software books I've yet owned.

If you are new to Ruby, this may very well be the book you are looking for, since the author was really serious about the 'well-grounded' in the title. Together the first six chapters form Part 1, aptly called 'Ruby Foundations'. Here you'll learn about objects, modules, classes, self and control-flow techniques. Although this part may not be the most interesting for more experienced Rubyists, it's certainly well-written and manages to present a lot of very fundamental Ruby right at the beginning. True, at first I was a bit surprised to see that singleton methods were ' implicitly ' introduced before classes, but when you follow the author's logic, it all makes a lot of sense. What I really like about this approach is that it exposes the reader to concepts needed for some quite advanced Ruby coding right away, and in a very light-hearted and 'natural' manner. Well done!

Part 2 ('Built-in classes and modules') covers everything from strings, over symbols to regular expressions and file I/O. What I really like about this part is that the author dedicated two whole chapters to collections and iterators/enumerators, which are essential for everyone striving to become fluent in Ruby.

Last but not least Part 3 ('Ruby dynamics') talks about singleton methods, procs, lambdas, Symbol#to_proc, the various eval methods, bindings and introspection, thus equipping the reader with all the necessary tools for metaprogramming, one of the many things that make Ruby that sexy little beast it is.

The Well-Grounded Rubyist is probably the best programming book I've ever read. It's well-written, interesting, and systematically builds an understanding of Ruby from the ground up. I'm only about half way through it, and already it has taught me far more than all the other Ruby resources I had seen put together. Not only do I feel much more comfortable using Ruby, but I have much more appreciation for what an interesting and deeply consistent language it is.

If you plan to learn Ruby, or want to deepen your understanding of it, buy this book.

"The Well-Grouded Rubyist" by David A. Black leads readers through the foundations of Ruby programing language to the basics of advanced concepts such as metaprogramming.The book will be very useful for beginner Ruby programmers who, having knowledge of some other programming language, want to learn the basics of Ruby. It gives the taste of the language, presents its strengths and scripting applications. The code examples are simple, comprehensible and very concise, which makes them the excellent illustration to the introduced elements of the language. It is worth noting that "The Well-grounded Rubyist" covers version 1.9.1 of the Ruby language and therefore introduces its novel features.