Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide [Paperback]

But I found Programming Ruby to be an excellent starting point -- it provides the quick-start help I need by giving numerous and well thought-out examples both in the body of the text and in the reference section (see below).

The chapters are well arranged (and even include information on distributed Ruby on page 272, often where most texts just start talking about file I/O!), with the first 276 pages devoted to an introduction to the language. The last 250-or-so pages contain an excellent library reference, alphabetically arranged.

The devil is in the details, though. And here, AW put a lot of thought into the finer points. The type is clear; the typographic conventions are standard and, if you've used any other typical programmer's text, easy to follow. So far, this is what you'd expect from any good computer title. In addition, however, they have added an easy-to-use thumbtab system for the alphabetical arrangement of the reference section, so finding a particular entry is quick and easy. Each entry in the reference section is clearly laid out with a class hierarchy (including super- and subclasses), parameters, description, "Mixes in" and a list of all class methods (most (if not all) with examples and output. All well-designed not only for the experienced Ruby programmer but also for the novice.

The index is thorough, with helpful vertical lines between the columns, and the reference section entry is identified by bold page numbers.

All in all, I would highly recommend this book for new Ruby programmers. There are still a number of things I don't understand about Ruby, but this book is an excellent place to start. It sets the bar very high for future books on this new and exciting programming language.

The pick-axe book as it is called among the ruby-fans (because of the front cover) is very well suited to beginners as well as experts. It's driven by examples that gives you a extremely good feeling of the power of Ruby. It's fun to read and excels in its unusual but still very gentle learning curve. You'll be finished with the basics of file-handling, I/O, GUI and Threads within the first quarter of the book!

The book is divided into four parts: A tutorial for newbies, a practical part on Ruby in its setting, a crystallized part with all the advanced and gory details of Ruby (for the experts), and finally the Ruby Library and Standard Library Reference. The reference is very well arranged and easy to navigate in to say at the least. You'll very quickly find yourself jumping around in the book - revisiting cool examples and trying things out for yourself.

You'll pick up Ruby in a number of few days. If you're in doubt go and have a look at www.rubycentral.com where you will find excerpts of chapters from the book, FAQ, links, articles, code snippets, etc. arranged as well as the book :-) I hear there's even been put up an on-line tutorial if you want to try Ruby out right away.

Comming from a background of C, C++, Java and Python I've found the language Ruby to beat them all. I didn't think I would need to learn another language, but with Ruby I was positively surprised.

Most of the time programming Ruby feels like designing directly in a language that supports the way you think about the problems at hand!

So what is Ruby? Here is a little shortcut list for those in a hurry: Easy to learn, high level of abstraction, interpreted, true OO, file-based source code, flexibility, convenience, metaclasses, closures/blocks, iterators, collections, mixins, continuations, threads, regular expressions, modules for patterns support, transparency, dynamic typed, easy to extend (even easier than Python), portability, light weight, easy to embed, modest in use of system resorces, but most importantly: Fun and joyful!

And thats just the surface. E.g. the authors have even used Ruby to implent parts of an X11 window manager.

It's almost as close as SmallTalk in being pure OO, while you still can make procedural programs if you want to. The simple, clean and concise syntax competes with and wins over the syntax of Python many times. It has the power of C++ while leaving out the details, that slows your development-speed down. You need less code-lines than in Java, but without the loss of clarity or readability. Many Perl-programmers or sys-admins have been shifting to Ruby because of its greater readability while still being just as expressive and powerful.

I could go on, but take a short look at www.rubycentral.com and see for yourself. Ruby's worth it.

Dennis Decker Jensen

I give this book my highest recommendation, it is one of the best books I have read of its type (language intro). As for Ruby, if you are thinking about learning a language and want to do OO for anything except systems and embedded programming, then this is the language to look at. (for systems and embedded, OO is probably not a good idea in most cases anyhow... object-based is about the highest you'd want to go.)