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.
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intresting language (Score:5, Interesting)
Theres a intresting presentation of it, comparing to some other languages here:
http://www.io.com/~jimm/downloads/rubytalk/talk
Looks like the language uses lots of sort cuts, might give it a try sometime
My little (unreleased) intro to Ruby (Score:4, Interesting)
It's only a first draft, but it should give a reasonable overview to the curious.
Ruby shines with unit tests (Score:5, Interesting)
* a terse syntax
* True object orientation
* dynamic typing
* and *unit tests*
is a winning combination. The first three allows you to write well-factored, compact and flexible code. With a comprehensive test suite you have much more confidence in your code than you get from static typing, so it effectively voids that issue.
Another thing I really like about Ruby is that you can reopen classes. This means that you can add features to existing classes, if that is where they really belong. When you do that every object of that type automagically gets the new features. Along with the fact that a lot of built-in features in ruby are methods, and the fact that you can rename and redefine existing methods means that ruby itself can be extended in very interesting ways! E.g, lets say you want to load ruby modules from zip files! Simple, just redefine Kernel.require to access zip files as well as directories.
Most of all, though, I just like the ease of expression you get with ruby.
Re:Ruby is Swell but... (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem of support is, of course, a real one in many applications. The fallacy of the "who cares?" argument here is that the same argument could probably have been used against every programming language since the first assembler was written. Not every new language "makes it" by a long shot, but not every well-supported language lives forever, either. Python was barely on people's radar for the very longest time; it has succeeded because enough people were convinced it had advantages that outweighed a temporary (or possibly even permanent) disadvantage in publicity, support, or whatever reason-to-fail you might give.
Well, you can be proud of your heritage without repeating the sins of your parents. :-) As far
as I can tell (I've programmed in Perl since 1991
and in Ruby for a few months), Ruby retains much
of Perl's flexibility while hugely reducing
the amount of (non-regexp) "line noise" feel that
even I think Perl sometimes has, and dramatically reducing the number of oddball special cases. I
know you could say the same thing about Python,
but I never really "got into" Python, for whatever
reason. Like it or not, I think we all realize
that tastes vary somewhat in these things.
Any thorough, unbiased comparison Ruby v. Python? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ruby shines with unit tests (Score:2, Interesting)
ruby's great and all, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Lack of a CPAN type tool is *still* the reason I haven't mainly switched to python BTW. Download sites like VoP aren't even in the same category.
Ruby is a wonderful language (Score:1, Interesting)
"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite
you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man." --Mark Twain