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Pat Shaughnessy

Ruby Under a Microscope: An Illustrated Guide to Ruby Internals 1st Edition

by Pat Shaughnessy (Author)

4.5 55 ratings

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Ruby is a powerful programming language with a focus on simplicity, but beneath its elegant syntax it performs countless unseen tasks.

Ruby Under a Microscope gives you a hands-on look at Ruby's core, using extensive diagrams and thorough explanations to show you how Ruby is implemented (no C skills required). Author Pat Shaughnessy takes a scientific approach, laying out a series of experiments with Ruby code to take you behind the scenes of how programming languages work. You'll even find information on JRuby and Rubinius (two alternative implementations of Ruby), as well as in-depth explorations of Ruby's garbage collection algorithm.

Ruby Under a Microscope will teach you:

How a few computer science concepts underpin Ruby's complex implementation
How Ruby executes your code using a virtual machine
How classes and modules are the same inside Ruby
How Ruby employs algorithms originally developed for Lisp
How Ruby uses grammar rules to parse and understand your code
How your Ruby code is translated into a different language by a compiler

No programming language needs to be a black box. Whether you're already intrigued by language implementation or just want to dig deeper into Ruby, you'll find Ruby Under a Microscope a fascinating way to become a better programmer.

Covers Ruby 2.x, 1.9 and 1.8

ISBN-10

1593275277
ISBN-13

978-1593275273
Edition

1st
Publisher

No Starch Press
Publication date

November 22, 2013
Language

English
Dimensions

7 x 0.88 x 9 inches
Print length

360 pages
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Well known for his coding expertise and passion for the Ruby programming language, Pat Shaughnessy blogs and writes tutorials at https://patshaughnessy.net/. He also develops Ruby applications at management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. Shaughnessy is a regular presenter on the Ruby conference circuit, and his articles and presentations have been featured in the Ruby Weekly newsletter, the Ruby5 podcast, and The Ruby Show.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ No Starch Press; 1st edition (November 22, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 360 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1593275277
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1593275273
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.48 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 0.88 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #145,094 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6 in Ruby Programming
- #61 in Object-Oriented Design
- #127 in Microsoft Programming (Books)

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4.5 55 ratings

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4.5 out of 5

55 global ratings

5 star		76%
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1 star		4%

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JJ

Fabulous, Readable, ENJOYABLE Language Internals Book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 27, 2017

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I've meant to buy this book for ages. I wish there were books like this for every programming language. It's very readable and approachable. Not dry zzz material at all. Contrary to what he says though, you cannot really be into it unless you're peeking at the C source :)
General lessons are learnable here that apply to lots of languages too.

3 people found this helpful

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BH

Great look at Ruby's internals

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 2, 2017

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Great information about Ruby. Nice diagrams as well as experiments that show cool Ruby commands to peek into its internals. Highly recommend if you are interested in programming languages.

2 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Pat Shaughnessy is a software engineering maven.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 17, 2015

Verified Purchase

Learned things that the Ruby reference does not explain well enough. Also learned general software engineering concepts, not just Ruby. Does not cover the parser in depth, but that's expected as bison is quite complex.

One person found this helpful

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ndc

Fantastic book, great achievement

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 11, 2017

Verified Purchase

Amazing! Excellent! Fantastic! Whee!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 29, 2015

Verified Purchase

Very easy to read and understand.

One person found this helpful

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Lighthouse

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 31, 2014

Verified Purchase

Excellent read

One person found this helpful

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Richard T. Kingslan

Relevant and mandatory - Akin to K&R's 'C' reference, or Windows Internals for the Windows OS for the Ruby developer

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 5, 2014

Ruby has become a major player in application and (by extension) Web development due to the easy to acquire skills to use the language, the expansive library sets due to the open source nature and the integration and support on nearly any platform.

Me, being a Windows OS guy, I look to major references like Microsoft Press’ “Windows Internals” to understand how things really work – not just at the surface – but why something does what it does. For example, if the distributed processing calls (DPC) result in interrupts consuming the processor, I know I’m usually looking at a driver or hardware problem.

“Ruby – Under a Microscope” is much like “Windows Internals” in that the how and why of Ruby is revealed.

What should be clear from the idea of an in-depth, deep technical details book – this isn’t for the beginner, like Microsoft Press’ “Windows Internals” isn’t for the newbie Windows OS user. If you don’t know what DPCs are and what they do – knowledge of DPCs is pretty much useless. To get the full value from this book, you should already be an experienced Ruby programmer (or have depth in similar languages). What the experienced developer will get from this book is the details that will allow them to extract more power from Ruby, better understanding of why things happen, and how to better use Ruby to solve the really hard problems.

Now that we’re past the “who this book is for” part, there is one more thing to understand before you decide that this is of value to you: Exactly WHICH Ruby are we talking about? Yes, Ruby is available on nearly all platforms. However, this is because some hard working people wanted to make sure that the language was widely available, and these hard working people made it available on platforms other than what the original Ruby was developed for.

So, how do you know which version of Ruby this book is focused on? The book is focused on the Matz (Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto) Ruby Interpreter, written in C. Other implementations are discussed, and these are discussed in the context of how others implemented the language that Matz created in 1993.

The book treats Ruby as a science study, much like a scientist would study microbes (“…Under a Microscope”, get it?). Instead of looking at organisms, the book looks at the base elements of Ruby: The actual ‘C’ source code. If you’re a computer science major, this is nothing new. The source code is studied to understand what Ruby does to perform the tasks that you give it. As you go through the book and look at Ruby at the very base elements, you can gain a complete understanding of how computers really work. There is nothing more basic than the process of providing information to a computing machine and seeing how the actual process of creating tokens, parsing of tokens, compiling into an intermediate format, and then passing onto the virtual machine (YARV – Yet Another Ruby Virtual Machine) that interfaces at the machine level. Once the processing is complete, understanding how to receive the output, convert it back into something that the programming language can understand is absolutely vital to knowing why things work. And, probably most importantly, knowing what’s wrong when they don’t work.

This is the real goal of “Ruby: Under a Microscope”. Providing understandable information for the knowledgeable programmer to gain a deep understanding of what Ruby is, what it does, and how it attains the goals that it sets for itself. This opens the door wide open for those that want to add to the language with libraries and extensions – which is the real power of a successful language: Expansion by anyone with a great idea.

7 people found this helpful

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Dustin Schultz

It's like the "How it's Made" episode for Ruby

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 29, 2013

TL;DR: This book does an excellent job of explaining the C implementation of Ruby. It's very well organized and takes you on a step by step journey through Ruby. It's mainly focused on the C implementation but it does describe other implementations, albeit with not as much detail as I would have liked.
---
If you're curiosity for how things work (like me), you'll really enjoy this book. The seemingly "magic" things that Ruby does all have a clear and straightforward, step-by-step, explanation.

What I liked:
* The book is well organized and explains some very complicated topics in a very understandable way.
* Figures are repeated so you don't have to flip back and forth (a little thing but very helpful)
* Has a very computer-science-like feel to it. It's a fun read if you're a computer science geek like me.

What I didn't like:
* The chapter on JRuby is severely lacking in my opinion. Given that the other chapters did a nice deep dive on the given topic, I felt a little bit cheated on the JRuby chapter. This was more of a really broad overview of JRuby with one or two examples.

* The book explains a complicated topic in several chapters but you're left to put everything together on your own. I would have liked to have seen one additional chapter that took a sufficient Ruby program and did a full walk through of all the concepts you'd learned in the previous chapters; basically, a top to bottom overview chapter.

Who can/should read this:
* Anyone interested in programming languages or implementing your own programming language.
* Those who want to become better Ruby developers.

Prereqs:
* You'll need to know a little bit of C to understand the standard Ruby implementation examples but other than that, there's no prereqs. You don't really even need to know Ruby that well ( I don't ). If you don't understand what the piece of Ruby code is doing, it's easy to look up online to quickly figure out what it does.

4 people found this helpful

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Leandro Krug Wives

Conheça os bastidores da linguagem Ruby

Reviewed in Brazil 🇧🇷 on November 19, 2014

Verified Purchase

O livro é muito bom para quem quer entender como a linguagem funciona nos seus bastidores (mecanismos internos de funcionamento). É um livro importante para quem quer programar melhor em Ruby e compreender a melhor maneira de fazer alguma coisa, visto que entenderá quais são as abordagens usadas nos diferentes mecanismos adotados. Indispensável para todo profissional de computação que trabalhe com Ruby e também para os curiosos.

2 people found this helpful

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Irsyad Asyhari Lubis

Good read. Very informative!

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on March 15, 2020

Verified Purchase

What I like about this book is that the author doesn't immediately jump into the technical details. But, instead, he explains the concept in a bigger picture first. From there, he introduces the technical detail one concept at a time.

Mohsen Alizadeh

I love this book

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on February 7, 2019

Verified Purchase

Amazing book about ruby internals. It is complex may take some time to grasp all the concepts. You maybe need to read several times.

Jean

bien

Reviewed in France 🇫🇷 on June 18, 2018

Verified Purchase

correspond en tout point. a ce qui était attendu par mon fils qui l’a commandé sur le site. très bien.

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Ruby Under a Microscope: An Illustrated Guide to Ruby Internals 1st Edition

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