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Three Books About the Ruby Programming Language
DJSpray writes "I've written a review of three books about the Ruby programming language, available on my weblog here. The three books are Yukihiro Matsumoto's Ruby in a Nutshell from O'Reilly, Hal Fulton's The Ruby Way (Sams), and Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide by Dave Thomas and Andrew Hunt (Addison-Wesley). Note that the third book is available online here for those who prefer that sort of thing. Executive summary: while I have found several of the other O'Reilly Nutshell series books to be excellent, this one is riddled with errors, confusing writing, and omissions, and does not live up to O'Reilly's usual standards. Fulton's book is filled with good cookbook examples and well-written explanatory material, as well as solid tutorial examples, but it is not structured as a reference. The Pragmatic Programmer's book works well as a reference and covers language features in increasing depth, but with fewer examples. Ruby beginners may find that the latter two books actually complement each other nicely, while I can't recommend this edition of the Nutshell book at all."
Ruby is a competitor to both Python and Perl. In some sense, it is an attempt to combine the best features of each. My belief is that it succeeds well at this goal. It offers an even purer OO approach than python, while offering much of perl's strong syntactic sugar.
I'd place ruby somewhere between "a cleaner python" (at least, in terms of design-- ruby learned the lessons of Python for free, that Python had to learn the hard way...) and "a saner Perl"... (of course, Perl's insanity is half the fun!)
It's got all the LISPy goodness of Python (and supports true closures & continuations, which IIRC are only to be found in experimental implementations of Stackless Python), the regexpy powerfulness of Perl, and the dynamic-OO cleanness of Smalltalk.
I find it really makes programming fun again, and it's very easy to write extensions for it in C (or C++, if that's your bag, baby)... in fact, using ruby as the "brains" behind a bunch of C modules gives you the silly-fast speed of C, while correcting C's worst deficiencies (you get free GC, safer string handling, namespaces, OO, etc.)
Ruby's "chock-full of heady goodness", and definitely worth adding to your repertoire.
A 4th book on Ruby that I kind of like is _Ruby Developer's Guide_ by Robert Feldt, Lyle Johnson, Michael Neumann (Editor), Lyle Johnson, Jonothon Ortiz.
This has a series of chapters on more applied topics that would be good for the Slashdot programmer audience: DBI, XML, SOAP, Performace, Parsers, etc... The book is a little wordy, but the topics covered are very useful and it imparts a lot of useful information for people who don't want to relearn basic syntax.