The Ruby Way, Second Edition: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming (2nd Edition)...

The Ruby Way, Second Edition: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley ... | Hal Fulton | A great book for Ruby beginners

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The Ruby Way, Seco...

	The Ruby Way, Second Edition: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley ... Hal Fulton Addison-Wesley Professional, 2006 - 888 pages average customer review:based on 21 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Best ruby book yet

Just to say I have almost every Ruby and every Rails book out here,
To me, his one is by far the best.
The writing style is very good, and even if the author says it's not intended as a tutorial, you could definitively use it to learn Ruby from scratch too.

A great book for Ruby beginners

I haven't done much with Ruby and decided it was time to dive in. I opened this enormous text and started. The book is broken down nicely into several beginners "howto" sections and then into more of reference and advanced learning portion.

Coming from a Perl programming background I found several things (mostly syntax) in Ruby quite odd and am very happy to have this reference on hand.

The GTK section of the book is very nice as I haven't seen it covered elsewhere. The additional coverage of Rails adds to the completeness of the material and helps the book win some popularity on a current hot topic.

This is a very well-rounded text for Ruby programmers. I would recommend it to anyone interested in learning Ruby, regardless of programming experience.

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A good choice for a second Ruby book...

This is a book I could see being really helpful for someone who's done the Ruby tutorial and now needs to actually *use* the language to do something... The Ruby Way (2nd Edition) by Hal Fulton.

Contents: Ruby in Review; Working with Strings; Working with Regular Expressions; Internationalization in Ruby; Performing Numerical Calculations; Symbols and Ranges; Working with Times and Dates; Arrays, Hashes, and Other Enumerables; More Advanced Data Structures; I/O and Data Storage; OOP and Dynamic Features in Ruby; Graphical Interfaces for Ruby; Threads in Ruby; Scripting and System Administration; Ruby and Data Formats; Testing and Debugging; Packaging and Distributing Code; Network Programming; Ruby and Web Applications; Distributed Ruby; Ruby Development Tools; The Ruby Community; Index

Fulton states in the introduction that this book is not designed to be a "teach yourself Ruby" title. Instead, it's meant to explore the power and utility of the language by means of examples. Think of it as a *really* large cookbook-style volume. In each chapter, there are a series of how-to sections that are practical examinations of a particular technique. For instance, in the regular expressions chapter, you'll see sections such as using anchors, positive and negative lookahead, recursions in regular expressions, and detecting doubled words in text. This solutions-based approach to Ruby is perfect for someone who has covered the basics via a tutorial or some other book, but now has to actually use the language to do something. Personally, I find having a book like this is extremely valuable in making the jump from rank novice to functional developer. I know good code when I steal it... :)

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random access for someone already knowing Ruby

Yes, there are some typos in Fulton's book. But the vast bulk (and it is indeed a big text) can be profitably read. Either by someone wanting to learn Ruby from scratch or by a Ruby programmer searching for a solution to some common problem. For the former, the book may be too long. If you want to come up to speed on Ruby, ab initio, perhaps you might consider a slimmer text.

The book is best suited as a random access resource, for a Ruby programmer. As implied by the title. The 400 odd examples demonstrate a good diversity of usages of the language. Grouped according to broad topics like threads, user interfaces and networks. This helps you focus on finding a possible solution. However, suppose you can't find an exact match. The numerous examples may have one close enough to suggest an easy mod.

Granted, if a relevant example has typos, so that it won't run, that's a drag. But only a minor one. If you already know Ruby, fixing this should be a low level detail.

As far as comparing with other scripting languages, well the book does not do this. No mention at all of Perl or PHP. Probably the author regards this as outside the book's remit. The decision of whether you should use Ruby over those alternatives is something that cannot be answered by this book alone.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5

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