Book review: "Best of Ruby Quiz" by James Gray

James Gray is a seasoned Ruby veteran who has been adding value to the community for a long time. One of his major contributions is the Ruby Quiz - a competition modeled after the Perl Quiz - each week a new challenge is posted and people are encouraged to contribute solutions. In the end of the week, James analyzes the most interesting solutions and presents a summary on the website (and the mailing list).

This book is a digest of the 25 most interesting quizzes and their solutions carefully collected by James and released in one volume (using some very pretty typesetting, I must add). It's basically a printed version of the website, with only very little content added - like additional exercises after each quiz. And this is where the problem of this book lays, in my opinion. To experienced programmers it won't be particularly interesting, since looking at the quiz website itself and participating in the lively discussion on the maling list is much more interesting. This book could be excellent for newbies, but unfortunately it's not meant for those unfamiliar with the language. So even here, the website is just far more useful. The only real advantage of this book is its dead-tree format, which may be nice for people who have difficulty reading from the computer screen, or for people temporarily without internet access.