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The Ruby Way, Second Edition: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)
vBulletin Book Store > vBulletin books beginning with R
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The Ruby Way, Second Edition: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series) |
Author: Hal Fulton
Published: 2006-11-04 |
List price: $44.99
Our price: $29.69
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Usually ships in 24 hours
As of: December 01st, 2008 01:23:02 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Not for everyone
If you want to learn or expand your knowledge and/or proficiency in Ruby as quickly as possible, this is NOT the book for you! Hal Fulton's "The Ruby Way" is an excellent example of a miserably poor technical literature. It presents us Ruby as if it were a rather obscure poorly defined powerful beast whose many features could never be seen completely at one time, leaving the reader in a suspense and waiting for missing information to appear in the following paragraphs, which may indeed never show up.
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br /That is not to say that there aren't many interesting things to be found in the book, however, the question is weather they are worth the time you have to spent searching for them as if you were a desperate cowboy sifting through the river sands of the wild west to find few grains of gold. If you are not seeking adventure and useless wandering around and about, do not bother reading this pedagogically unsound concoction. Perhaps best use of this book is on the book shelf - for occasional picking up at random times to check out the most obscure and weak areas of your Ruby proficiency, providing that such indeed is the case.
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br /Let me give you an example for instance, on page 425 you will find the following conclusion after arguably too trivial treatment of the pertinent subject: "You can nest a class within a module, a module within a class, and so on. If you find an interesting and creative uses for these technique, please let us all know about it." This statement tells us very much about the mindset you ought to have in order to appreciate this book. This suites a description of a pioneer, an explorer in a research institute, or indeed an adventurer. Continuing on the same page, author is discussing Ruby peculiarity - "class instance variables" in the shadow of commonly known "class variables", failing to explain the most important mechanics behind the example he presents, which makes this paragraph interesting only for someone very well versed in Ruby intricacies.
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br /However, if you are a Ruby novice, perhaps even proficient in C++, Java or in something similar, unless you have tones of spare time and are just trying to test your understanding of Ruby and explore someone else's take on the subject, I then recommend instead to read a much less voluminous an far superior book on Ruby by D. Flanagan and Y. Matsumoto entitled "The Ruby Programming Language". If you feel after reading Flanagan's and Matz's book you may be ready for something like "The Ruby Way", I believe a second or even a third reading of "The Ruby Programming Language" is a far better choice.
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 Wow, what an incredible book and so many angles not usually covered!
I am thrilled by this book. So many books cover things like sockets without going into detail on important things like non-blocking I/O... which is what you usually need. There's enough detail and especially sensible code to make it an excellent reference even thougn it covers many topics.
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br /A real treasure, and very readable as well as insightful. I've still got a lot of material to cover, and I'm looking forward to every minute of it.
 A great reference point throughout your Ruby development lifetime
The Ruby Way
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br /Ruby is best described as an object-oriented language, and is very similar to Smalltalk. Overall, the book is well written and contains useful examples throughout.
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br /However, I feel the first point worth stating is that if you're new to Ruby then this book is not for you. Whilst it does cover Ruby in depth, it is aimed at the developer who has already mastered the basics of the Ruby language. Although readers who are familiar with Object orientated development may be able to grasp the concepts described in the first chapter, there are a number of alternative books that better suit the beginner.
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br /That said, this is a highly comprehensive book. Each section is broken down into logical sections with detailed explanation and code examples, allowing the reader to develop code while they make their way through the book. Each chapter breaks down the core libraries into manageable sections starting with strings, regular expressions, time functions and progressing on to other, more complex areas such as threads, socket programming and distribution of code.
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br /The book seems to lack depth in the basic areas of Ruby development, my main complaint being that structure and syntax are not covered sufficiently for the beginner. Some readers may be able to "read around" this subject, using tutorials or another beginner's guide, however, this defeats the point of buying a book that suggests it is suitable for beginners.
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br /Section 1.5 (training your intuition) is, without a doubt, the section most readers will find beneficial. Providing an easy layout covering syntax issues, case conditions and a useful section relating to "rubyisms", such as differences between subclasses / inheritance and the "singleton" classes and iteration within Ruby. This section includes a vast amount of code examples allowing the user to flick straight to it in order to get real world examples.
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br /Overall rating
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br /I would recommend this book only if you were planning to purchase 2 or 3 beginner books. As an insight into the various libraries and books the book works very well, helping the user quickly grasp the concepts. Rating of this book needs to be performed from two perspectives: The "Ruby newbie" and "Ruby beginner".
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br / Ruby Newbies
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br / 5/10: whilst most OOP developers would be able to pick up this book and use it to learn, newcomers would definitely find this hard going. I would recommend "Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide, Second Edition" for new developers and OOP developers with no Ruby exposure.
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br / Ruby beginner
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br / 8/10: This book will serve as a good reference point throughout your Ruby development lifetime, and you will find yourself referring to it time and time again. Teaching you Ruby one concept at a time helps the beginner grasp the basics without having to delve into chapters of "Hello World" based applications.
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Excellent
This book is very thorough and a pleasure to read- there are great code examples in it as well.
Good Book for beginners
It is an excellent book for people new to Ruby, or having previous background in ObjectOriented languages. It provides detailed write ups with working examples.
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