A mediocre, outdated, verbose book about the Ruby programming language.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,

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.

Looooong

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.

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.

is a great explanation for planning and management in rubyonrails drivers of all kinds, for example controller model depot ....class and hashes.

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.

A great, if not slightly out of date, guide to writing idiomatic ruby.

I enjoyed the author's conversational style.

fafa

On one hand a bit outdated and verbose, on the other hand it explains common solutions to the usual task very well. A bit like the perl cookbook with better writing.

An update to my favorite book on the Ruby programming language.

Pleasantly surprised that it was suitably formatted for Kindle reading (most all programming books get this wrong).

Probably one of the most well-known books among rubyists, "The Ruby Way" by Hal Fulton with André Arko, has now been updated and released in its third edition. The first part of the book is dedicated to the language itself and covers syntax, semantics, some comparison to other languages and specific issues, like garbage collection, that developers are well served to know when writing ruby.

The majority of the book is divided into sections that deal with specific task that a developer may encounter. From basics like working with String, numerical calculations and Enumerable collections to more advanced techniques like Threads and Concurrency, Metaprogramming, Network Programming and Distributed Ruby. Each chapter has plenty of code examples and thorough explanations.

I expect my copy to get plenty of used as my programming takes me to unknown or forgotten parts of ruby.