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44 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent book for experienced programmers, July 15, 2002
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.
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