Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series

The Ruby Way

... Show More
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.

839 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,2001

This edition

Format
839 pages, Paperback
Published
January 1, 2007 by Addison-Wesley
ISBN
9780672328848
ASIN
B007YZZ5UE
Language
English

About the author

... Show More
Hal Fulton is a software developer in real life; he has two degrees in computer science and is the author of "The Ruby Way". His passions are reading, writing, music, art, and theatre. He lives in Austin, Texas, in a condo located directly above the center of the Earth. His hobbies include live music and passing counterfeit bills to tourists. His short stories have been rejected by some of the finest magazines in the country.


Community Reviews

Rating(4.2 / 5.0, 19 votes)
5 stars
9(47%)
4 stars
5(26%)
3 stars
5(26%)
2 stars
0(0%)
1 stars
0(0%)
19 reviews All reviews
April 17,2025
... Show More
A mediocre, outdated, verbose book about the Ruby programming language. In 900 pages, this book covers anything any everything Ruby-related, going into (often excrutiating) detail about even the most arcane Ruby libraries. The code samples in this book are pretty bad examples of idiomatic, clean Ruby code. For example, he has a consistent habit of using rescue clauses with no exception names, a terrible practice which commonly leads to false-positives. Even syntax errors will be ignored! The explanations are pretty bad too. This book even confused me about concepts I'd already understood. This book may work as an okay cookbook, but you'd be better off just reading the Ruby Cookbook. It can also be used to discover some libraries you may have never heard of. But by all means, do NOT try to read this all the way through or, God forbid, use it to actually learn Ruby,
April 17,2025
... Show More
Not a particularly useful reference or tutorial. Fulton concentrates on canned "recipes" for solving specific problems; really all you can do is try to generalize from these approaches. His choices of problems to solve seem rather questionable (finding Easter, for instance) and he doesn't spend much time talking about best practices in Ruby, so it's ultimately just a bunch of scripts that won't be relevant to most people.
April 17,2025
... Show More


This was the book that made me get ruby. I had read a couple of books before but this really got the concepts through to me.
April 17,2025
... Show More
Good for the Ruby programmer who wants to improve their programming skills by directed learning. Not such a good book for the casual Rails developer.
April 17,2025
... Show More
is a great explanation for planning and management in rubyonrails drivers of all kinds, for example controller model depot ....class and hashes.
April 17,2025
... Show More
I was expecting to get laid. So I decided to clean my room. Under all the filth I found something. An artefact from times long gone. This book. I started it at least two years ago, and never finished it. ‘I can’t leave it that way, I will read it right away’. And now, I’ve done it. Yay.

The moral of this: Do not read this book if you want to get laid.
April 17,2025
... Show More
A great, if not slightly out of date, guide to writing idiomatic ruby.

I enjoyed the author's conversational style.
Leave a Review
You must be logged in to rate and post a review. Register an account to get started.