Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Professional)

Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Professional) | Peter Cooper | A better book to learn Ruby than "Programming Ruby"

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Beginning Ruby: Fr...

	Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Professional) Peter Cooper Apress, 2007 - 664 pages average customer review:based on 28 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Excellent book for novice Ruby programmers

This is an excellent book for anyone getting started with Ruby, or who has been using Rails for a little while and feels they need stronger Ruby skills (which, I suspect, describes a great number of Rails programmers, myself included).

Despite its title, this is not just a beginner's book. It does start at the beginning, and it is written without assuming a lot of background, but it is not a simplified, dumbed-down treatment. I found it to be very easy to read, and it follows a natural progression from language basics through a variety of advanced topics.

The author is a very experienced Ruby programmer, and his insights shine throughout the book. (Among many other things, he's the creator of Feed Digest, Ruby Inside, and code snippets, which he sold to DZone.

In addition to an exposition of the language that builds nicely over the course of the book, there's chapters on the Ruby ecosystem, how to design an application, and network programming. There's also a chapter that covers many of the useful libraries and gems.

There is one chapter that summarizes Rails, but this is definitely a Ruby book, not a Rails book.

Any Ruby book will inevitably be compared to Dave Thomas' Programming Ruby (commonly known as "the Pickaxe" for the image on its cover), which has been the standard reference for the language since its debut and won't lose its spot as a reference work. I found Beginning Ruby to be easier to absorb, however, and I thought the examples were especially clear and useful. If you're already deep into Ruby, you probably don't need this book. But if you're relatively early in the learning curve, I highly recommend it.

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A better book to learn Ruby than "Programming Ruby"

I think Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional is a better first Ruby book than the venerable Pickaxe (a.k.a. Programing Ruby). The previous statement is almost heresy in the Ruby community. Don't get me wrong, you should own the Pickaxe. It's a great book and certainly lives up to it's description as "the definitive reference to Ruby". That said, it's very big, and is much more of a reference than an introduction.

Beginning Ruby is an excellent (and I would argue more approachable) introduction to the Ruby language, written by one of it's more notable users. Weighing in at over 600 pages, this is a comprehensive book. At the same time, it's quite a bit smaller than the Pickaxe, which makes it much more portable (there's also a PDF version available for $10 if you've purchased the dead-tree edition, for the ultimate in portability).

This book covers everything you need to know to be productive in Ruby. It covers the built in functionality of Ruby well, in addition to covering a lot of the libraries that you will need to do more advanced things. Peter's writing style is concise, but not dry. As a result, the book is very readable.

In summary, if you want to learn Ruby, this is the book to buy.

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Well-written, concise, and logical -- a great place to start

If you are a Ruby newbie like myself developing a RoR application, read this book *before* you dive into Rails-specific titles like Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition. It will make your life far easier. The overview of OOP alone is worth the price of the book.

Great book

I've purchased many of the most recommended Ruby books. I find that I use this one, ten times more than the others. As a beginner, this book clearly explains things, gives examples that can easily be replicated and covers most of what I needed to learn, it has a great index so it can be used as a reference guide, it has very few typos and it's emphasis is not at first what I though I needed but now as I become more experienced it is exactly correct. In my opinion, other ruby and rails authors who are writing for beginners could benefit greatly by adopting the format and style of this book.

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Excellent Book On Learning Ruby

This book is fantastic for anyone looking for a start with Ruby. I've read several books on Ruby and RoR over the last 6 months and this one is by far the best. The writing is clear, the programming projects show very useful concepts in a very real way, and unlike other programming books, it takes you into the community, and how to get involved. It doesn't hurt that it's written by one of the best Ruby developers out there.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6

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