Reviews for Making Use of Ruby

1. Quite a good Introduction to Ruby

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, September 12th, 2003

   I bought all the other Ruby books, so I thought I'd complete my collection and buy this one too. It gives quite a good basic intoduction to Ruby and is written in a clear and easy to understand manner.
   For quite a small book there are a lot of topics covered and some good task-orientated exercises, which help to get you started thinking about Ruby in a more practical way.
   I'd recommend it for a beginner as it covers prgramming basics and the language syntax, but it lacks the depth of knowledge found in other Ruby books, especially concerning some of Ruby's syntax sugar. There are a couple of nice chapters though on Object Orientation and Multi-threading.
   My main gripes are that the back of the book refers to Ruby as a scripting language which is not the case - it can be used for Scripting, but is much more than that as it is a full OO programming language with just as much power as Python. Finally there is no information covering Ruby's unit testing framework, which in my opinion is the place to start when programming, especially when everywhere you look today you see Test Driven Development and Agile and XP practices.