The Ruby Programming Language: Everything You Need to Know

The Ruby Programming Language is an amazing book. It is a full comprehensive guide to the language including many advanced topics and is ideal for any programmer who wants to master the Ruby language.The author assumes the reader has a sound foundation in programming another language and often gives excellent examples and analogies for people that may already understand a concept or context in C/C++, Java, Perl, or Python for example. He does the same to warn about things that are different or reversed to avoid confusion, e.g. (pseudo phrasing) "If you're a Java programmer, note that [it] works the opposite way in Ruby. Instead of..." I would not recommend this book to you if you don't have any experience programming but anyone with a sound handle on the basic fundamentals of coding with instantly fall in love with it.The book is sectioned and organized masterfully making topics easy to find and forward and backward references found throughout the book are helpful instead of a hinderance. The book may have to be read mostly in order for someone who has no previous experience in Ruby, but the topics are contained well enough so that someone looking to hone their skills in certain areas can find what they need very easily. In the extremely rare event that there is an error in the book it is always something like the font appearing too close together or a misspelling in a comment in one of the code examples. Literally, the worst error in the book is that in one code example the author ended a sentence in a comment with a comma by mistake instead of a period.Ruby is a very powerful and versatile language. As such the book covers some advanced logical material but the author is considerate enough to warn the reader ahead of time. Chapter 8 in particular, and in the interest of being complete, covers some Metaprogramming techniques that many readers might not ever need to use or know. It's there for you if you need it. The code examples are concise, well documented (even more so in potentially confusing areas), and structured beautifully.This is one of the best books I have read in a VERY long time. In fact, this book has inspired me to break an 11 year silence in technical book reviews. Wow.

I was familiar with Dave Flanagan through his Javascript book. Seeing his name on the cover of this book was all I needed to buy it. And of course it doesn't hurt that Matz -- Ruby's creator -- was the other author. But to be fair, I had seen Matz' work in O'Reilly's "Beautiful Code" -- an essay called "Treating Code as an Essay." It was not only the best piece of writing in that book, but one of the best essays on programming I've ever read. It prompted me to scour the Internet for more of his writing, which lead to some great interviews on artima.com.Although I could not tell you who wrote what, the combination in general is perfect. Flanagan's writing is always concise, practical, and to the point, with good examples. Like the late W. Richard Stevens -- he has a knack of anticipating your questions as you read and answering them. Matz insists on breathing life and humanity into what could otherwise result in dry technical treatment. His personality is to make things fun, which is why Ruby is such a wonderful language. While I am hardly a language aficionado, of the few languages I do know -- C/C++, Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby and Javascript -- Ruby is by far the most enjoyable, readable, concise, powerful, and overall easy to use of them all.The book is solid all the way through. And it lived up to Ruby's prime directive: it made this programmer happy. There are some other Ruby books out there that are very good indeed. But if I was limited to only one, this would be it.

I bought this book after reading the other reviews here. All the people I know personally who work with Ruby learned from the Pickaxe but from the reviews I came to the conclusion that this could be actually a better book for learning the language. So, I didn't read the Pickaxe and cannot really make a comparison but from what I heard and comparing with this one I would get the Pickaxe if I should choose again.After finishing reading this book I can say that there are a lot of topics that I really don't remember anymore and lots of doubts that I still have. The major flaw here is that there are no exercises anywhere in the book. All the best programming books I read in the past have very good exercises to evaluate what you've learned (I could give as examples Learning Perl, C++ Programming Language, Core Java, etc). I think that without exercising what you learned it's really hard to judge how much you have really learned.Another thing which is not described in the book is how to organize a big project. I'm used to working in large projects in C and C++ and I really have no idea of how to organize a large project in Ruby, how to organize classes in files, etc. I will start studying Rails now, and will get the Rails code and read it to make sense of how to organize a large project but be aware that this is not described here.Also some sections of the book, are really "dry", like the one who talks about functional programming which is really hard to follow (this one is the first that came to my mind but there are a lot of sections which are hard to follow or don't make a lot of sense when reading first time). These sections are clearly targeted at advanced Ruby programmers.I'll rate this book with 4 stars because despite the flaws I mentioned, the explanation of the language in general is really good.

Aunque es una versión anterior de Ruby (1.9), sigue siendo una excelente referencia de los fundamentos. Muy relevante el hecho que uno de los autores, Yukihiro Matsumoto, sea el creador de Ruby.

perfect for a ruby beginner but a old-time programmer

Really good book for both general knowledge and reference. Just wish that they sold programming books in my country as getting books online is always expensive.

Bueno como lectura y como referencia. Gracias a el muchas cosas de rails que me parecian magia ahora son ciencia.

I am currently learning Ruby with this book, and it really does its job. The author starts with a first familiarization, and then examine one by one all the possibilities of the language. This being modelled after the classical Kernighan and Ritchie C language book makes the structure both familiar and effective.