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."

Comments

Ruby's biggest problem

[metamatic]

I like what I've seen of Ruby. There's just one snag: no UNICODE support except via libraries.

I already know Perl. I'd like to learn something cleaner, and Ruby looks like exactly what I'm looking for. However, I'm not prepared to put in effort learning yet another language that doesn't have native multilingual text support.

Doing everything via library calls to get UNICODE support is an ugly hack... and like I say, I know Perl, so my ugly hack requirements are already adequately met.

Re:Ideal language

[bwt]

Many people who might like ruby better are happy enough with perl and python. Perl has a much larger class library because it's the established player. Many people who were dissatisfied with perl's loosy-goosy style and OO approach probably already left and went to python.

At some point many potential switchers say "OK, maybe ruby is slightly better at this and has this other advantage, but I can live without that slight advantage because I get a bigger community and class library to draw from by staying with [perl|python]"

Personally, I don't find that argument persuasive because I think it's good to know more langagues and I give my first look to ruby and fall back to python or perl only if I need class libraries that I don't want to write myself.

I own two

[Fished]

I own Ruby in a Nutshell and Programming Ruby. For the most part, I agree with his assessment. Ruby in a Nutshell was originally published in Japanese only. My impression is that it was translated by someone with limited experience; everything is syntactically correct, but the writing style is wooden and it's just not a very interesting read.

However, I think the Practical Programmers' book is much better than you give it credit for. It does a credible job of introducing an experienced programmer to the Ruby Language (although it's really not for those who are not familiar with an Object-Oriented Language). I have found that that is my standard Ruby resource.

Incidentally, I only picked up Ruby a few months ago, and have found it to be a great language. Unfortunately, some of the support is not yet there. I've ended up doing my latest project in Java because I don't want to lock myself into a language that will not support high-end scalability features.