Ruby Developer's Guide (Paperback)

by Syngress (Author) "Programming should be like driving a good car: Buttons are clearly labeled and easy to reach; you're comfortable as soon as you get inside; there..." (more)
Key Phrases: ordo notation, standard profiler, def initialize, Frequently Asked Questions, Solutions Fast Track, Michael Neumann (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Ruby astounds developers with its ability to make programming fun again. It frees programmers to concentrate on programming objectives, and creates fewer obstacles than other languages by flowing ideas directly into the code. Although Ruby is experiencing dramatic growth, there are very few educational resources available for aspiring developers. Written by a team of Ruby gurus, Ruby Developer’s Guide is the most comprehensive book available for serious Ruby developers.

About the Author
Lyle Johnson is a Software Team Leader at ResGen, Invitrogen Corporation in Huntsville, AL. Prior to his employment at ResGen, Lyle served as Group Leader for Graphical User Interface Development at CFD Research Corporation. Lyle has worked primarily in commercial software development for computational fluid dynamics and bioinformatics applications, but has also managed and contributed to a number of open-source software projects.

Lyle holds a bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering from Auburn University and a master's of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He currently lives in Madison, AL with his wife, Denise.

Jonothon Ortiz is Vice President of Xnext, Inc. in Winter Haven, FL. Xnext, Inc. is a small, privately owned company that develops Web sites and applications for prestigious companies such as the New York Times Company. Jonothon is the head of the programming department and works together with the CEO on all company projects to ensure the best possible solution. Jonothon lives with his wife, Carla, in Lakeland, FL.

Robert Feldt is a Software Engineering Researcher at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. His professional interest is in how to produce robust, reliable software. Robert’s research focuses on what can be learned from applying the complex but robust systems found in nature to tools and methods for developing and testing software. Robert also teaches courses on software engineering to students in the Computer Science and Computer Engineering programs at Chalmers University.

Robert holds a master’s degree from Chalmers University and is a member of the IEEE. He has previously worked as a consultant software engineer. He programs mostly in C, Haskell, and Ruby and uses Ruby frequently in his research since its dynamic nature allows him to easily test new ideas. He is working on a number of larger Ruby projects, including the Rockit compiler construction toolkit and the RubyVM project, to build a set of plug-and-play components for assembling Ruby virtual machines.

Robert currently resides in Gothenburg, Sweden with his wife, Mirjana, and daughter, Ebba. He wants to acknowledge them for their support and love.

Michael Neumann is a Database and Software Developer for Merlin.zwo InfoDesign GmbH in Germany (near Stuttgart). He is also studying computer science at the University of Karlsruhe. Merlin.zwo develops large-scale database applications based on Oracle products. With more than 10 years of experience in software development, Michael has specialized in many different domains, from system-near programming, administration of Unix systems, and database development with several RDBMSs, to OOA/OOD techniques, and design and implementation of distributed and parallel applications. One of his greatest interests lies is the design principles of programming languages. Before he was employed at Merlin.zwo, he was a Database/Web Developer and Principal of Page-Store.

Product Details

• Paperback: 720 pages
• Publisher: Syngress; 1 edition (January 18, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1928994644
• ISBN-13: 978-1928994640
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,170,383 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An adventurous cookbook for advanced Ruby programmers., April 12, 2002

By	Aiden Mark Humpheys "Aiden" (Germany) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Astounding how one sided the flow of information is in the
computing world. Despite Japan's impeccable high tech
credentials most anglophone programmers are unfamiliar with the
Japanese approaches to software development. Shame, as Ruby,
created and widely used in Japan, suggests that there is much to
see and learn.

Ruby, as you probably know, is a particularly elegant OOP
language created in Japan by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto. Ruby is
often described as an OOP a scripting language. A debatable
description; this book shows that Ruby is a software engineering
language whose zone of applicability has as much in common with
Java or C++ as with Perl.

The ground covered here has relatively little in common with
other Ruby books. Ruby as a data processing tool or glue
language is handsomely covered in Fulton's Ruby Way cookbook and
the Pragmatic Programmer's "Programming Ruby" is more tutorial
in nature. No book for beginners, Ruby Developer's guide steers
away from there areas in to more exotic zones.

The bulk of material in the book could be described as a guided
tour through the Ruby Application Archive - a large, and at
times anarchic, zoo of contributed Ruby code.

Particularly interesting is the coverage of distributed Ruby
programming, SOAP/WebServices, Rinda - JINI's JavaSpaces for
Ruby. The various GUI toolkits are given an airing and the book
looks at techniques for writing C extensions to the language.

The chapter on XML covers all the major parsers including Sean
Russell's divine REXML package. Sadly XSLT processing gets only
a page and a half of coverage, nothing to drag Python
programmers away from their current toolkit. Despite the book's
700 pages, the often wordy presentation leaves little space for
a more thorough exploration of the theme.

In the end what impresses about the Ruby Developer's Guide is
how "hot" many of the programming areas covered in this book

remain. Almost a snapshot of the Ruby mailing lists, one gets
the positive impression that the book was being updated a few
weeks before it hit the shelves.

The danger of writing a hot book of course is that, most
probably, it will cool more rapidly than coverage of "classic"
data processing themes. Time will tell if the more experimental
areas of coverage remain as interesting over the lifetime of
this book (will Ruby still have four competing approaches to XML
parsing ?, for example). None the less, a challenging and
consistently interesting volume for intermediate to advanced
programmers.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars This book needs better editing, June 8, 2002

By	Daniel M. Debertin (Minneapolis, MN United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

You should buy this book for the information in it. It's a nice tour through the RAA, going through DBI, the various XML processors, XMLRPC/SOAP, Tk/GTK, and other packages that make you want to use Ruby for *everything* ;).

But don't buy it for the writing. It's excessively verbose (do I really need a walk-through of the install process for every package? come on...), is typeset in an overlarge font, has too many screenshots, and has far too many spelling and usage errors.

In short, this book is a bit of a doorstop, but it does contain useful information, and I find myself referring to it often.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Pretty Good Content. Poor Editing and Presentation., September 12, 2005

By	Michael A. Thomas (CO USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm not sure how this book has achieved so many stars from previous reviewers. While the content is decent and wide-ranging (if you can get past the editing), the presentation overshadows it in a negative way. The editors and designers of the book managed to do a couple of things that really, REALLY annoy me in technical books:

Poor editing. There's little economy in the writing, which is annoying. The author(s) probably don't have English as their first language, and it shows in the end result. That's not the authors' fault - it's the editor's (if there *was* one). Sloppy editing is (IMO) the sign of a "let's just make some $$ off the 'hot' ruby language" attitude.

The examples stretch over many pages in some cases, in large part because they are presented in a font that is too large, and is double-spaced. That's just stupid: it makes the code hard to read, and whether or not it was intended, it has the appearance of just fattening up the book to take up more shelf space (yes, publishers do this - the cheesier they are, the more likely they are to do it).

The book didn't inspire me to try any of the stuff that was presented. Honestly, I think I might have been better off just scouring the net for example uses of Ruby's extensive libraries and add-ons.