Reviews for Ruby Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly))

1. Brilliant

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, January 12th, 2010

   A great source of little programming snippets and how to's to help out when the brain isn't working at maximum capacity.

2. Another great Cookbook from O'Reilly

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

   As with most O'Reilly cookbooks, Ruby Cookbook has two main avenues of exploration: the core of the language, and an introduction to some of the more important libraries, presented as the solutions to a series of themed tasks and problems the working programmer might face.
   
   Coverage of the likes of XML, databases, networking, web services is all present as you'd expect, but I always enjoy the exploration of the core language the most, especially as it applies to strings, arrays and hashes, where the idioms and 'zen' of programming in a language are normally revealed. Ruby Cookbook excels in this area, but it also provides a very solid grounding in Ruby's object system, namespaces/modules and blocks. The basics of Ruby's metaprogramming and reflective abilities are also well enumerated, although the recipe-like structure of the book doesn't quite communicate the 'magic' behaviour that pervasive Ruby metaprogramming (exemplified by Rails, of course) conjures.
   
   If you've read Perl Cookbook, rest assured that the Ruby version is easily as good, although as you might expect, in the latter half of the book there's less emphasis in Ruby Cookbook on low level networking and sysadmin work and more on higher level libraries. That said, the chapter on Rails felt a bit superfluous.
   
   This book is well-written and thorough, and would be a great second Ruby book (The Pickaxe being the obvious example for a first book). Some of the examples are even quite amusing. Unless you were hoping for some truly in-depth metaprogramming detail, you'd be hard pressed to find anything wrong with Ruby Cookbook, except for the fact that it's competing with established Ruby must-read The Ruby Way, which covers very similar ground, in a very similar style. You don't need both books, and I preferred The Ruby Way. Nonetheless, this stands on its own as a great Ruby book.

3. Excellent and thorough

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, September 12nd, 2006

   Having had this book for a week now, and used it on more than a few occasions, I can say this is as good as the other "cookbook" books from O'Reilly.
   
   Coverage is split over a host of topics, and, they've even included a small, but interesting chapter on Rails (the hot Ruby topic at the moment).
   
   It's always useful finding code for things, and the helpful commentaries on the code provide a degree of insight that's hard to pick up from just reading someone else's source-code.