Slashdot Mirror
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."
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'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.