Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers Guide, Second Edition

Book Description

Ruby is an increasingly popular, fully object-oriented dynamic programming language, hailed by many practitioners as the finest and most useful language available today. When Ruby first burst onto the scene in the Western world, the Pragmatic Programmers were there with the definitive reference manual, Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide. Now in its Second Edition, author Dave Thomas has expanded the famous Pickaxe book with over 200 pages of new content, covering all the new and improved language features of Ruby 1.8 and standard library modules. The Pickaxe contains four major sections:

• An acclaimed tutorial on using Ruby.
• The definitive reference to the language.
• Complete documentation on all built-in classes, modules, and methods
• Complete descriptions of all 98 standard libraries.

If you enjoyed the First Edition, you'll appreciate the new and expanded content, including: enhanced coverage of installation, packaging, documenting Ruby source code, threading and synchronization, and enhancing Ruby's capabilities using C-language extensions. Programming for the world-wide web is easy in Ruby, with new chapters on XML/RPC, SOAP, distributed Ruby, templating systems and other web services. There's even a new chapter on unit testing. This is the definitive reference manual for Ruby, including a description of all the standard library modules, a complete reference to all built-in classes and modules (including more than 250 significant changes since the First Edition). Coverage of other features has grown tremendously, including details on how to harness the sophisticated capabilities of irb, so you can dynamically examine and experiment with your running code. "Ruby is a wonderfully powerful and useful language, and whenever I'm working with it this book is at my side" --Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks /p>

Reviews From AMAZON.COM

Essential reference

This is basically the same book as the first edition, but updated for ruby 1.8, including the many new packages that are part of the standard ruby installer. The sections on gem, RDoc, and Test::Unit were welcome additions. I would have liked to see a lot more coverage of the Win32 libraries, but at over 800 pages I suppose the author had to make some hard decisions.

You better already know how to program...

I'd suggest already knowing an OO language before you start reading this book. The book approaches its concepts backwards: It starts with the complexities (except for that intro chapter) and then teaches you the simple concepts. One of the things that was completely stupid was that it showed examples of using regular expressions for 1.5 chapters and then explained what regular expressions were afterwards. The authors do not have the common couresy to let you know they'll explain what their stuff means later.

I also agree with a previous review that says this book should be 1/3rd as long as it ended up being.

Now if you already know OO concepts, this book is great. The authors explain everything in as much detail as necessary or more (and i'd rather have more than less). They often explain something and compare it to C or C++ or Java which I like. And the book seems to be absolutely complete. You'll feel like a Ruby MASTER when you finish it. For someone that already knows OOP, the only way this book could be better would be if it were more concise.

If you're a programmer and you want to pick up Ruby, I suggest it.