Reviews for The Ruby Way (Sams White Books)

1. Excellent intermediate ruby cookbook

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, February 12th, 2006

   The assumption is that you have som previous exposure to OOP in general and Ruby in particular. I have taken up programming after many years of other professional activities and I have mainly used Smalltalk and Java earlier. I bought this while waiting for a new version of Dave Thomas "PickAxe" and it really has been furtunate. It complements Thomas book and has a suiting coverage - reallly achieving the goal of being an "inverted reference" of functionality.

   Sometimes the book is a bit too verbose in my personal taste and the discussion of advanced concepts - closures (blocks) and continuations - is a tad blurry in Fuller's book, but then again these are fairly advanced concepts. All in all I think the book has some wonderful recipes - Levenstein distances, XML parsing, accessing SQL databases and day-to-day scripting for system administrators. I really hope that SAMS decide let Hal Fuller make a second edition of this inspirational source of Ruby knowledge !

2. The Ruby Bible

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

   This book gives the most solid foundation in programming Ruby of the four that I own.

   Whenever an understanding of a concept escapes me, this is the book I reach for. It doesn't hold your hand completely, and it doesn't patronise. Unfortunately, it also means it's not a beginner's book. Someone familiar with programming another language should find themselves comprehending Ruby to the same level fairly quickly.

   Thankfully, it also covers OO concepts from the Ruby perspective to a high degree, which is important if your previous OO experience was C++... not that it's difficult or especially different, more that there's always a much simpler way of doing it in Ruby which might not be immediately obvious.

   The most useful section in the entire book is 'Ruby in Review' which explains the language's syntax and idiosyncracies in such detail that it's probably worth ripping this section out to make sure it's always handy! As I've said elsewhere, it not having a similar section is probably 'Ruby in a Nutshell's most glaring and unfortunate ommission.

3. Best Ruby Book so far... should by 4.5 stars

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, January 12th, 2003

   This has become my 'bible' for coding in Ruby, perhaps after 'Ruby in a Nutshell' as the latter is great for quick-lookups and syntax reminders.
   The best section perhaps is that on RUby idiosyncracies, i.e. the syntax-traps and tricks, as since Ruby's parsing engine is so flexible, it can be a little unclear as to which is the 'right' way, or more importantly, why one way doesn't work the way you thought it should.

   The only reason for 4 stars instead of 5 is that I'd like to have had better coverage of some of the more popular/useful libraries, incl. the downloadable ones, even if only a brief introduction to them. I'm not sure if this is fair, however, as many Ruby libraries are in a state of flux; perhaps '4.5' is more fair.

   Nevertheless: This is probably the best book to get a solid grounding in Ruby programming, and decent OO programming, too, which in my view is the most important way to start.

4. A well written programmer's cookbook for the Ruby language

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, April 12th, 2002

   Ruby, as you probably know, is a particularly elegant OOP
   language created in Japan by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto.

   Some describe Ruby as a scripting language though this is moot.
   Although Ruby has had its long standing disciples outside of
   Japan (Fulton must count as one of them) 2001 saw a torrent of
   converts to the language and no less than 4 Ruby books published
   within 6 months of each other. Lucky Ruby, since each is a well
   written work rather than the "first to market" pot boilers many
   publishers produce.

   This volume takes for form of a classic programmer's cookbook,
   somewhat similar in style and content to Christiansen &
   Torkinton's "The Perl Cookbook". The material covered could be
   summarized as Ruby as a glue language - data processing, system
   administration, database and web. It would be fair to conclude,
   therefore, that this book is aimed at casual Perl programmers
   with a taste for OOP, who have looked with growing horror at
   Perl-5's convoluted OOP approach.

   Fulton also covers areas that extend somewhat beyond Perl's
   usual zone of activities - Gui toolkits, multi-threading and OOP
   techniques. The author writes well and his coverage of OOP in
   particular offers insight that Java or C++ programmers might
   also appreciate.

   How does this book differ from the competition? The material is
   faster paced and assumes some prior exposure to Ruby, in
   contrast to the Pragmatic Programmer's book which is more
   tutorial in nature. The Matz book is thorough yet dry reference.
   Ruby Developer Guide from Feldt et al is perhaps more
   adventurous in choice of material - essentially a walk through
   the Ruby Application Archive covering areas such as RubySpaces,
   WebServices and Parser Generation that do not appear in Fulton's
   book. Of the four it will probably be the "Way" book you reach
   for most frequently when you are building Ruby applications.