Reviews for Ruby in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly))

1. Pocket Reference or Nutshell?

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

   Overall a good reference book. Having used Ruby a lot over the last few years, I'd also used this book a lot.
   It's mostly useful for an experienced Ruby programmer, as there's gaps in the detail meaning you have to work it out, read the source-code or search the web in order to understand it fully; it often feels more like a big 'Pocket Reference'.

   If you could take the 'Ruby in Review' section from 'The Ruby Way' (esp. the 'Training your Intuition' bit) and fill in several of the explicit details -- e.g *all* the argument and return value types, complex pattern matching, Finalizers, Tk, etc, etc -- this would not only be a bigger book (;-) it would become a great deal more thumbed-through. As it is, I tend to read the source-code a lot.

   Despite all this, it had helped a great deal in my early days, and is still small enough, clear enough and well-arranged enough that I add my notes to _this_ book rather than anywhere else. My copy's full of penciled-in notes.

   The downside is that Ruby 1.8's here, now, and some very important additions, like StringIO and Unit Testing (and possibly YAML) will hopefully mean Ruby in a Nutshell v2 is around the corner...

   If you get this book, get 'The Ruby Way' as well, and it will all make a lot more sense.

2. Not up to scratch

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, March 12th, 2002

   "Ruby in a Nutshell" provides a nice reference to Ruby's builtin classes and standard library, but that's about it. Unlike other "Nutshell" books, it doesn't go beyond the online documentation.

   The indexing and layout is poor; finding the relevant page should not involve having to hunt through the index. The information that is provided is often incomplete or misleading.

   The middle chapters of Thomas and Hunt's "Programming Ruby" still remains the most useful source of information on the Ruby classes; "Ruby in a Nutshell" is simply a nicely printed version of a few old documentation pages.

3. Fast Read, good Reference book

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, December 12th, 2001

   Nice neat book, not what I expected to have when it mentioned that it was a nutshell, but it was a fast read, nice organiztion, and lovely langauge to learn. you still need to refer back to the online documentation, and other books may be :) such as programming Ruby by David Thomas, this works like the pocket reference, if you already know programming, its a quite fast read, no fluf