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The Ruby Way, Second Edition: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)


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ISBN: 0672328844 - The Ruby Way, Second Edition: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)

Title:	The Ruby Way, Second Edition: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)
Author:	Hal Fulton
Publisher:	Addison-Wesley Professional
Type:	Book / Paperback
Publication Date:	04 November, 2006
ISBN / ISBN-13:	0672328844 / 9780672328848
List Price:	$44.99
You Save:	$15.30
Amazon Price:	$29.69

This book is also available, brand-new, from 3rd-party marketplace sellers at Amazon.com, from $25.96.

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Editorial Review / Publisher's Information:

Product Description

Ruby is an agile object-oriented language, borrowing some of the best features from LISP, Smalltalk, Perl, CLU, and other languages. Its popularity has grown tremendously in the five years since the first edition of this book.

The Ruby Way takes a “how-to” approach to Ruby programming with the bulk of the material consisting of more than 400 examples arranged by topic. Each example answers the question “How do I do this in Ruby?” Working along with the author, you are presented with the task description and a discussion of the technical constraints. This is followed by a step-by-step presentation of one good solution. Along the way, the author provides detailed commentary and explanations to aid your understanding.

Coverage includes

• An overview of Ruby, explaining terminology and basic principles

• Operations on low-level data types (numbers, strings, regular expressions, dates)

• The new regular expression engine (Oniguruma)

• Internationalization (I18N) and message catalogs in Ruby

• Operations on hashes, arrays, and other data structures such as stacks, trees, and graphs

• Working with general I/O, files, and persistent objects

• Database coverage including MySQL, SQLite, Oracle, DBI, and more

• Ruby-specific techniques in OOP and dynamic programming

• Graphical interfaces in Ruby (Tk, GTK+, Fox, and Qt)

• Working with Ruby threads for lightweight multitasking

• Everyday scripting and system administration in Ruby

• Working with image files, PDFs, YAML, XML, RSS, and Atom

• Testing, debugging, profiling, and packaging Ruby code

• Low-level network programming and client-server interaction

• Web development tools including Rails, Nitro, Wee, IOWA, and more

• Working with distributed Ruby, Rinda, and Ring

• Ruby development tools such as IDEs, documentation tools, and more

The source code for the book can be downloaded from www.rubyhacker.com

Hal Fulton has worked for over 15 years with variousforms of Unix, including AIX, Solaris, and Linux. He was first exposed to Ruby in 1999, and in 2001 he began work on the first edition of this book–the second Ruby book published in the English language. He has attendednumerous Ruby conferences and has given presentations at several of those, including the first European Ruby Conference.

He has two degrees in computer science from the University of Mississippi and taught computer science for four years before moving to Austin, Texas to work as a contractor for variouscompanies, including IBM Austin. Hal currently works at Broadwing Communications in Austin, Texas, maintaining a large data warehouse and related telecom applications, working daily with C++, Oracle, and, of course, Ruby.

Other Items You May Enjoy:

- Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide, Second Edition
- The Rails Way (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)
- Ruby Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly))
- The Ruby Programming Language
- Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition

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Customer Reviews:

• Excellent

04 August, 2008

This book is very thorough and a pleasure to read- there are great code examples in it as well.

- Reviewed by customer ID: A3D57PRI31FIII

• A Great Reference Point Throughout Your Ruby Development Lifetime

30 August, 2008

The Ruby Way 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Overall rating 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". Ruby Newbies 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. Ruby beginner 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.

- Reviewed by customer ID: A20ME9577B42XJ

• Not For Everyone

02 November, 2008

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. 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. 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. 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.

- Reviewed by customer ID: A3ASSM3XVU2UMI

• Good Book For Beginners

17 June, 2008

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.

- Reviewed by customer ID: A1TZMUQL9OAH3I

• Wow, What An Incredible Book And So Many Angles Not Usually Covered!

06 September, 2008

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. 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.

- Reviewed by customer ID: A2AVBVRLKVO92Z

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