PROGRAMMING : Ruby/Pickaxe
This is the book for learning Ruby. Written by the Pragmatic Programmers it covers Ruby from basic through to mildly advanced, with excellent chapters on Gems (the packaging for ruby programs), writing your own C extensions and the internals of class construction.
I think most of the excitment of this book comes from Ruby itself, but the authors do a reasonable job of covering how to program with it, and the 'attitude' to take when doing so (DuckTyping comes to mind). Some of it is a little undisiplined - I had to go back over a couple of sections to see what they really meant, and a few bits left me wondering about the full extent of what they had just said (when they are describing the scoping rules, especially of blocks, they don't cover _all_ posiblities).
This is all fixed in the review toward the end of the book of the entirity of ruby, which made a nice way to summarize everything I'd learnt and is the place to go when looking up something you've forgotten.
The real meat of the book is in the last few chapters: Duck Typing (this is the clincher - why do we need interfaces?); Classes and Objects(how do those dang things work?); Reflection, Object space and distributed ruby are all 'gems' (how to do groovy stuff with ruby).
Interested in Ruby? Then this, as they say on the book, is the difinitive guide. Get it now! (It's nice that some sections actually refer the reader to competing books which talk about a particular aspect in more detail; more evidence that the Ruby community is still friendly (and small....))
I think most of the excitment of this book comes from Ruby itself, but the authors do a reasonable job of covering how to program with it, and the 'attitude' to take when doing so (DuckTyping comes to mind). Some of it is a little undisiplined - I had to go back over a couple of sections to see what they really meant, and a few bits left me wondering about the full extent of what they had just said (when they are describing the scoping rules, especially of blocks, they don't cover _all_ posiblities).
This is all fixed in the review toward the end of the book of the entirity of ruby, which made a nice way to summarize everything I'd learnt and is the place to go when looking up something you've forgotten.
The real meat of the book is in the last few chapters: Duck Typing (this is the clincher - why do we need interfaces?); Classes and Objects(how do those dang things work?); Reflection, Object space and distributed ruby are all 'gems' (how to do groovy stuff with ruby).
Interested in Ruby? Then this, as they say on the book, is the difinitive guide. Get it now! (It's nice that some sections actually refer the reader to competing books which talk about a particular aspect in more detail; more evidence that the Ruby community is still friendly (and small....))
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