This review refers to the first edition of “The Ruby way”, published in 2001. With Ruby being quite a moving target (as an actively developed language), this book is dated. It seems that the author is about to release a 2nd edition in a couple of months, which will surely be much more up-to-date.

Having read “Programming Ruby”, I haven’t found anything new in “The Ruby way”, as it basically treats the same topics. Judging by its name, I was kinda hoping of a deeper treatment of “the way”, as in the correct approach to Ruby coding, explaining the mindset a programmer has to get into. But it’s far from that, unfortunately. It is more of an intermediate-level reference, touching quite a lot of topics and not focusing too much on idiomatic Ruby.

I have no idea what the 2nd edition will be like, but I think it will be quite interchangeable with “Programming Ruby, 2nd edition”. Reading both books doesn’t really add anything in terms of Ruby knowledge.

Related posts:

1. Book review: “Ruby Cookbook” by L. Carlson and L. Richardson
2. Book review: “Programming Ruby, 2nd Ed.” by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt
3. Book review: “Higher Order Perl” by Mark Jason Dominus
4. Book review: “C++ GUI Programming with Qt 3″
5. Book review: “Perl best practices” by Damian Conway

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 25th, 2006 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Book reviews, Ruby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.