Ruby Developer's Guide 94
| Ruby Developer's Guide | |
| author | Robert Feldt, Lyle Johnson, and Michael Neuman |
| pages | 720 |
| publisher | Syngress |
| rating | 7 |
| reviewer | Cole Tucker |
| ISBN | 1-928994-64-4 |
| summary | Good introduction to Ruby -- an overview as well as a practical cookbook. |
The writers of the book are very enthusiastic about both Ruby and the Ruby Application Archive (RAA), Ruby's response to CPAN. Overall, the text does a very good job demonstrating the base knowledge necessary for each of the libraries introduced and so can be quite useful to any developer with an understanding of core Ruby programming.
Directed towards programmers with a working knowledge of Ruby, the text is a quick read even with working through the examples. It effortlessly introduces the basic concepts of each package worked through and then gives locations where more in-depth information can be gathered. If you wish to work through any of the topics covered without digging through documentation just to obtain a basic grasp of the package, then this book is for you.
The book itself is a Syngress publication, and comes with a "1 year upgrade buyer protection plan" which seems to mean they have an errata page for the book and an "Ask the Author" section on the books website, along with a couple of other features mostly involving email. Looking at the errata page, it seems to be useful and up to date. The "Ask the Author" section also seemed to be fairly well-used by prior customers. Syngress seems to be serious about keeping customers up to date about the state of the book and providing services beyond that.
As for the book's problems, none of which are horrible, but do get old after a while: First, the book is big, and not completely because of content. The examples in the book span pages, and the text used in the source is a larger font that in the rest of the text. The examples also are full applications within themselves, instead of being presented in chunks and then having the full source available online. Another annoyance is each time the book mentions installing a package or library it goes through the whole "$./configure.rb; make; make install" process. The book also appears to have some organization issues, with notes for the text in the table of contents, which just served to irritate me. The final negative thing I noticed was that, though the text assumes programming knowledge of Ruby, the first chapter is dedicated to walking the reader through downloading and installing Ruby. The chapter is a big one too. So the book has a couple of hitches, mostly related to layout or mixed expectations towards the ability of the reader.
If you can deal with these small issues and are interested in the material covered, I can definitely recommend the Ruby Developer's Guide. The content is definitely there and they authors know their stuff.
Chapter List:
- Booting Ruby Discusses downloading and installing Ruby, IDE and editor support for Ruby and syntax stylings.
- GUI Toolkits for Ruby Covers use of Tk, GTK+, FOX and SWin GUI toolkits with a brush through on others available.
- Accessing Databases with Ruby Introduces the Ruby/DBI, Ruby/ODBC, Ruby/LDAp and Ruby DBM-file drivers.
- XML and Ruby Talks about the use of XML, including a basic introduction to it and then goes into parsing and creating XML using libraries from the RAA.
- Web Services and Distributed Ruby Goes into the libraries used for RPC's, SOAP and running distributed services with Ruby.
- WWW and Networking with Ruby Implements a server using high-level and low-level Ruby networking classes, then goes into using Ruby for the web, finishing up with a discussion of mod_ruby and eruby.
- Miscellaneous Libraries and Tools This chapter finishes the discussion centered around the RAA, going into graphics programming, data structures, genetic algorithms and other topics that didn't fit into a chapter of their own.
- Profiling and Performance Tuning Introduces the aspect of analyzing algorithms in Ruby, profiling your programs and discusses the advantages of similar Ruby constructs depending on what your focus is, with the intent of getting lean, mean programs.
- Parse Generators Discusses using Ruby instead of Bison or Yacc for creating a parser, and then goes into the advantages of various Ruby libraries to each other.
- Extending and Embedding Ruby Covers writing extensions to Ruby in C and C++ and later embedding Ruby into programs.
You can purchase the Ruby Developer's Guide from bn.com. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.
Re:WTF? (Score:2, Informative)
Ruby (Score:2, Informative)
Ruby is... (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.rubycentral.com/ [rubycentral.com]
and
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/index.html [ruby-lang.org]
Re:Ruby is Swell but... (Score:2, Informative)
No documentation? The entire Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide book is online for free at http://www.rubycentral.com/book/index.html [rubycentral.com]. The book (in HTML Help format) also comes with the Windows install package at http://www.rubycentral.com/downloads/ruby-install
No Documentation? (Score:3, Informative)
Ruby code examples (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ruby is Swell but... (Score:2, Informative)
Programming Ruby Online Edition (Score:5, Informative)
Other books (Score:5, Informative)
And some in german:
I prefer Ruby to Python, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Also, there is a bit of a disagreement about the GUI interface to use with Ruby. Fox is preferred on Windows machines, but it often causes library conflicts if you attempt to install it on Linux machines.
These are "growing pains", but for the moment Python is significantly more useable for many purposes. (OTOH, if I'm only using it on my own machine, or I only intend to distribute it to other programmers, and if GUI doesn't need to port to a system that can't handle gtk properly (e.g., Win95), then I prefer Ruby.)
OTOH, I'm still not totally convinced that importable modules can actually replace multiple inheritence. So far I haven't run into any show stoppers, but I keep having the nagging feeling that one is lurking somewhere in the future
Re:Other books (Score:3, Informative)
I would love to see this book get published, but the last I heard, as suggested by this message from the author himself, [google.com] the book has been cancelled. Does anybody know if they changed their minds on this or found a new publisher (Addison Wesley did the original contract)?
Very much 'Not Insightful' - List of Docs follows (Score:4, Informative)
Check out the ruby-lang pages list of docs [ruby-lang.org] there's a lot of good stuff there.
I own Programming Ruby - The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide [rubycentral.com] (available in full online) known as 'The Pickaxe Book' (ie the Ruby Camel) and Ruby in a Nutshell [oreilly.com] from OReilly by the language designer Yukihiro Matsumoto (known as matz on the mailing list). Hail matz!
Then there's a personal favorite dead tree of mine The Ruby Way [prenhall.com] by Hal Fulton. I haven't finished it yet but it's full of crunchy goodness.
Between, those books and the wealth of tutorials and docs linked from www.ruby-lang.org/en there's a lot more material available than there was for Python when I started using it.
And the fact that these books keep selling and getting published implies to me that people are using Ruby.
When in doubt check the Ruby Book list at www.rubygarden.org [rubygarden.org] to see whats out now and whats in the pipe.
As far as the bindings being buggy - I've only played with a few but they seem as good as I recall pythons bindings from when I used python. (admittedly that was a while ago)
C'mon give Ruby a try - I've found it a delight to play with. You might like it - and if not -well, learning why you dislike it is a valuable type of learning as well
I suggest the Pickaxe book [rubycentral.com] (you'll eventually want to buy a hardcopy) and if you don't want to download the interpreter right now - well hold onto your hats. A clever fellow named Clemens Wyss has an 'interactive' version of the Pickaxe with all the code examples live in your browser so you can play with the code a lil. Find it here [www.ruby.ch]
In closing:
RubyCentral [rubycentral.com]
RubyGarden [rubygarden.org]
Ruby-Lang [ruby-lang.org]
Ruby-Talk Mailinglist [ruby-talk.org]
or check out the newsgroup at comp.lang.ruby
Kevin
--
'Just another Ruby Miner'
Sample Chapter (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.syngress.com/book_catalog/183_Ruby/sam
If you want to see what the book is like.
(Note: I write books for Syngress, though I have no financial interest in this one. Consider this a plug if you like.)