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 bought this together with "Agile Web Development With Rails." They're not the solve-all, best-of-all-solutions by which a Ruby neophyte can jump to the top of the ladder... but they're about as good as we're going to find. An indispensable initial pair of books, which for my own purposes (with a 30-year background in C, C++, C#, Delphi, and dozens of other tools), got me off the ground and headed in the more advanced directions I needed to go to develop what is an extremely sophisticated first Ruby implementation. I could probably write a better book myself now, but sorry... lacking that, this is where you need to start.In my opinion, while Ruby expedites more or less generic implementations for many of us, and while Ruby implementations *may* be more cost-feasible than earlier FCGI (Fast CGI) implementations in everything from C, CPPB/MS C++, or Delphi from a *hosting* costs standpoint, and while Ruby is certainly far preferable (imo) to any of the scripting languages, to ASP, and even Python (at least altogether for any implementation I conceive of), I personally do not feel it is the ultimate development tool, because, particularly even if early CPPB/Delphi FCGI were readily implemented on any present hosting platform, and if these earlier implementations were as sustainable into the upward reaches of potential scaling needs, these tools give us the ability to do anything, and yet, impose no further development overhead or learning curve over the purportedly easy, limited tools such as Ruby.The truth is, while Ruby/Rails models expedite simple, straight-forward implementations, learning both, inside and out, as *is* necessary to go much further (such as developing practical, user-supported, wiki-like translation and display support of over a hundred different languages), you end up working very hard to *bend* the limited Ruby/Rails model to do what you really want to do. IMO, this means we still have a long way to go to deliver truly RAD, truly Object Oriented, optimized web implementations. There's a lot of room for improvement; and I really don't like to see us going the direction of interpreted implementations, heavily dependent on what really amounts to interpreted string concatenation.There *IS* a better way; and really, further languages and tools aren't the road to that better way; what we really need is better development templates and models ' yes, even in Ruby. One real, generic model only?Come on.