Book review: “Programming Ruby, 2nd Ed.” by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt
March 22nd, 2006 at 5:49 pmDave Thomas and Andy Hunt are the “Pragmatic programmers”, well known writers and hackers in the programming community. A few years ago they ‘discovered’ Ruby, which back then had a much smaller following than today, and set out to write a book that documents it.
Thus “Programming Ruby” (1st edition) was born. At its time it was the most complete guide to the Ruby language, and thus added a lot to its popularity, because of the authors’ clear and flowing writing style and their obvious affection for the language.
The second edition of the book is somewhat expanded, containing a few extra chapters and documenting the latest major release of Ruby - version 1.8 (the authors helpfully include notices throughout the book of features that are new or have changed from 1.6 to 1.8).
This book serves as a very nice reference to the language. It is divided to two main parts - the first is a very detailed overview of the language - probably the closest to a formal spec of Ruby you will find. The second part is a complete reference of the Ruby core classes and the standard library distribution. Personally, I don’t find the second part to be necessary, as all this information can now be generated from the Ruby installation by using ‘ri’ into a convenient .chm format.
I will certainly turn to this book when I need some feature of Ruby thoroughly explained, but it’s not a book to learn the language from. It is too much of a reference for it, and is quite scarse or ‘real’ code samples.
Related posts:
August 23rd, 2007 at 5:28 am
Re:
“The second part is a complete reference of the Ruby core classes and the standard library distribution. Personally, I don’t find the second part to be necessary, as all this information can now be generated from the Ruby installation by using ‘ri’ into a convenient .chm format.”
I went looking for the book in local bookstores in Delhi, just for a comprehensive guide to the variety of libraries in the Ruby family — I believe the book covers 98, good enough for me.
I would be very grateful indeed, to the extent of buying you beer should you ever be in town, if you would be a bit less cryptic for this relative newbie to the Ruby language, and tell me how I might find out:
1. what libraries exist for the Ruby language.
2. reference-level information on all the facilities the libraries offer I use ri as part of FreeRIDE, but it only provides limited information
Warmly,
Arun