Product Description: Ruby is an increasingly popular, fully object-oriented dynamic programming language, hailed by many practitioners as the finest and most useful language available today. When Ruby first burst onto the scene in the Western world, the Pragmatic Programmers were there with the definitive reference manual, Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide.
Now in its second edition, author Dave Thomas has expanded the famous Pickaxe book with over 200 pages of new content, covering all the improved language features of Ruby 1.8 and standard library modules. The Pickaxe contains four major sections:
An acclaimed tutorial on using Ruby.
The definitive reference to the language.
Complete documentation on all built-in classes, modules, and methods
Complete descriptions of all 98 standard libraries.
If you enjoyed the First Edition, you'll appreciate the expanded content, including enhanced coverage of installation, packaging, documenting Ruby source code, threading and synchronization, and enhancing Ruby's capabilities using C-language extensions. Programming for the World Wide Web is easy in Ruby, with new chapters on XML/RPC, SOAP, distributed Ruby, templating systems, and other web services. There's even a new chapter on unit testing.
This is the definitive reference manual for Ruby, including a description of all the standard library modules, a complete reference to all built-in classes and modules (including more than 250 significant changes since the First Edition). Coverage of other features has grown tremendously, including details on how to harness the sophisticated capabilities of irb, so you can dynamically examine and experiment with your running code. "Ruby is a wonderfully powerful and useful language, and whenever I'm working with it this book is at my side" --Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks
Excellent Book - Must Have for any Ruby Developer First and foremost, this book isn't a beginners guide to ruby, it doesn't hold your hand from "Hello, world", and it expects you to already know the basics of programming. Also, this book isn't a tutorial, it's a reference book first and foremost, and while it *does* guide you through some of ruby's basics that's not the primary intent. While there are excellent tutorials for learning ruby on the web, and excellent documentation for the standard library as well, Programming Ruby is something every ruby developer should have sitting at their desk.
This isn't because ruby is a hard language, but because the core documentation, while excellent, doesn't always give you decent sample usage, while Programming Ruby will tell you how to use part of the standard library with their clever 'ruby jukebox' scenario. This comes in really handy when they tell you how to handle threads, file I/O, and especially writing extensions in C.
So while you can happily code ruby without this book, you really shouldn't.
Good Stuff It's good enough that I refer to it instead of Google for the more mundane bits.
This book gets me home late! This is "the book" if you want to learn Ruby. I had my share of the web-search-print-and-try approach to get a taste on Ruby, and after reading this book I can say I haven't been so pleased to learn a programming language in a while. This book it's proof of what the "Ruby way" is. It doesn't just walk you through the details, dos and don'ts of the programming language, it allows the reader to grasp the practice of the "Ruby way" of doing things. And it's a clean, elegant, yet powerful way!
It's been such a nice experience it got me home late several times... I ended up at the subway terminal and making my way back for missing my station!
I sincerely recommend it ... and if you are tempted to invent excuses for getting home late, then have him/her read it too!
So-so After having just finished reading the excellent "Programming in C" by Stephen Kochan, I find "Programming Ruby" a bit lackluster. Like a previous reveiwer noted, the Jukebox example in the beginning several chapters is contrived, and frankly, annoying. Many of the code snippets are dependent on one another and it's not intuitive to figure out how they all come together to make a program, especially when one snippet is given and then an alternate is immediately provided - neither of which can exist independently.
I'd be more interested in a straight-forward and thorough approach. For example, the use of symbols is a little confusing (that partly appears to just be Ruby). In the introduction "notation" section, the use of the '#' versus the "." to differentiate types of methods just really got me off on the wrong foot - particularly when it was noted that one notation would be used despite it being invalid Ruby syntax. From that point on I had a bit of symbol overload trying to figure out what the '@', '@@', '#@', '#@@', '$', etc. meant. At one point, a string is referred to as "[#@lyrics]". The brackets were meant to be printed literally and had no programmatic meaning, but just seeing that typed made me do a double take trying to figure out what the square brackets were supposed to indicate. To answer, nothing.
I intend to complete this book, because I can foresee that the knowledge of the language will be worth it. I'm hoping the next edition can draw the reader in a bit better and will provide the information in a more thorough and consistent manner.
not that good Sorry but to me this book is not that good. I feel like the authors lack real programming experience. The JukeBox example seems out of a bad OO book, and I found few real-life examples. As a comparison I also recently red 'Dive into Python' from M. Pilgrim and wow! the difference was striking. I wish I could find a book like that on Ruby.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
