Reviews for Learning Ruby

1. Very good book

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, June 12st, 2009

   It's odd. I bought this then it sat on the shelf for a year. Then I finally had a notion to learn Ruby. This, as someone who's used Perl for 15 years, is almost a punishable offence, but anyway the book got picked up and then read from cover to cover. Along the way I began to see something maybe (surely not) a lot better than Perl. And now I'm trying to "think" a bit more in the Ruby way than the Perly way. And getting on just fine with it too. I've bought the wee Pocket Reference to go with it and the Pick Axe book also but Learning Ruby is an excellent overview kind of reminiscent of a certain Learning Perl book a long time ago...

2. Should be called "Learning Ruby for Programmers"

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, February 12th, 2008

   I have given this book 4 stars as I found it absolutely perfect for someone in my position. I have a fair amount of experience with Perl and C and have wanted to learn Ruby for some time. If however, you are hoping to learn a computing language from scratch via this book, I would seriously recommend that you reconsider.
   
   At 238 pages, this book doesn't so much teach you Ruby as give you a very concise summary of its features. The similarity between this book and the Ruby Pocket Reference are uncanny (right down to the same Author and code examples.) A cynic might think that this book is a slightly more fleshed out version of the pocket book.
   
   However, the examples given are always clear and the book never assumes prior knowledge, but rather it assumes you can grasp computing concepts with the briefest of descriptions, which most people who are starting from the beginning won't have a chance of doing. On the plus side, anyone with prior computing knowledge who wants to learn Ruby will not have to wade through superfluous tutorials on what conditionals are and what a float is that seems to take up a far portion of other books.
   
   One downside that I found however is that the questions at the end of the chapters are pathetic (eg. Chapter 9 on Classes, question 4: " True or false: In Ruby, even a class is an object.") I would have liked to have seen questions of the same standard as I found in Learning Perl.
   
   In summary, this book is an excellent guide to Ruby. I do believe however that it has the wrong name. It's closer in style to Programming Perl than Learning Perl in that it doesn't try to teach Ruby, rather show how to implement certain features of the language. Some people have criticized its brevity, but I believe that to be one of the book's stronger suits.