Reviews for The Ruby Way: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby)

1. Best Ruby book currently available

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

   This is a very thorough companion to just about everything in Ruby, starting with the core language features, and then moving onto some of the more important libraries. As such, it has a reasonable overlap with Ruby Cookbook. In most languages, you'd expect the O'Reilly's mighty Cookbook series to come off best, but The Ruby Way edges it in this case. It's that good.
   
   The Ruby Way not only covers more than Ruby Cookbook, it also manages to be a little more cohesive, dispensing best-practices and general wisdom amidst its well-chosen examples. If you already know another programming language, you could probably learn Ruby from this book (in particular, the first chapter contains a great set of reminders and idioms), and it might even be the only Ruby book you'd need.
   
   Apart from its comprehensive coverage of Ruby itself, there's also coverage of important Ruby projects like Rake, gems and Rinda. It even covers more than Rails in its chapter on web frameworks, although it must be admitted that you don't get too much sense of how these really work given the space allotted to them.
   
   One notable characteristic of TRW is that in places, it has a slightly fuddyish writing style, for example, it refers to the use of 'threequals' for the case equality operator as "hip and trendy" (with scare quotes included). I quite enjoyed this. Yes, there are some typos and mistakes in the book, but I didn't find it was a big problem, you can normally work out the correct syntax with the minimum amount of experimentation in irb.
   
   A mighty combination of cookbook and best practices (akin to Effective C++ and Effective Java, although Rubyists probably don't like the comparison to those languages), The Ruby Way is the Must Read of the Ruby literature.

2. Profound introduction to Ruby

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, January 12th, 2007

   This is the best book which I know if you are interested in general application development with Ruby (I'm referring to the second edition). It gives a detailed introduction to Ruby and the standard library on the first 450 pages. The last part of the book (another 350 pages) gives basic information on how to do multi-threading, GUI development, scripting for system administration, accessing XML and generating PDF, networking, and web applications. The book also gives information about RDoc, RubyGems, and irb ...