Ruby Developer's Guide

Rating:
Summary: An adventurous cookbook for advanced Ruby programmers.
Review: Astounding how one sided the flow of information is in the
computing world. Despite Japan's impeccable high tech
credentials most anglophone programmers are unfamiliar with the
Japanese approaches to software development. Shame, as Ruby,
created and widely used in Japan, suggests that there is much to
see and learn.

Ruby, as you probably know, is a particularly elegant OOP
language created in Japan by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto. Ruby is
often described as an OOP a scripting language. A debatable
description; this book shows that Ruby is a software engineering
language whose zone of applicability has as much in common with
Java or C++ as with Perl.

The ground covered here has relatively little in common with
other Ruby books. Ruby as a data processing tool or glue
language is handsomely covered in Fulton's Ruby Way cookbook and
the Pragmatic Programmer's "Programming Ruby" is more tutorial
in nature. No book for beginners, Ruby Developer's guide steers
away from there areas in to more exotic zones.

The bulk of material in the book could be described as a guided
tour through the Ruby Application Archive - a large, and at
times anarchic, zoo of contributed Ruby code.

Particularly interesting is the coverage of distributed Ruby
programming, SOAP/WebServices, Rinda - JINI's JavaSpaces for
Ruby. The various GUI toolkits are given an airing and the book
looks at techniques for writing C extensions to the language.

The chapter on XML covers all the major parsers including Sean
Russell's divine REXML package. Sadly XSLT processing gets only
a page and a half of coverage, nothing to drag Python
programmers away from their current toolkit. Despite the book's
700 pages, the often wordy presentation leaves little space for
a more thorough exploration of the theme.

In the end what impresses about the Ruby Developer's Guide is
how "hot" many of the programming areas covered in this book

remain. Almost a snapshot of the Ruby mailing lists, one gets
the positive impression that the book was being updated a few
weeks before it hit the shelves.

The danger of writing a hot book of course is that, most
probably, it will cool more rapidly than coverage of "classic"
data processing themes. Time will tell if the more experimental
areas of coverage remain as interesting over the lifetime of
this book (will Ruby still have four competing approaches to XML
parsing ?, for example). None the less, a challenging and
consistently interesting volume for intermediate to advanced
programmers.

Rating:
Summary: great book about a great programming language
Review: Ruby is together with python the new star at the programming
sky. no more ugly pointers, no memory management and Ruby
has a big and powerful high level standard library.
this book has lots of useful stuff in it. I liked especially
the chapters on DBI, SOAP and Performace. The Rexml part
could have been bigger in the XML chapter, but when the book
was written Rexml was not as powerful as it is today.
If you like Ruby (and you will if you want to have fun when programming) you should buy this book. the authers really know
what the are talking about.

Rating:
Summary: This book needs better editing
Review: You should buy this book for the information in it. It's a nice tour through the RAA, going through DBI, the various XML processors, XMLRPC/SOAP, Tk/GTK, and other packages that make you want to use Ruby for *everything* ;).

But don't buy it for the writing. It's excessively verbose (do I really need a walk-through of the install process for every package? come on...), is typeset in an overlarge font, has too many screenshots, and has far too many spelling and usage errors.

In short, this book is a bit of a doorstop, but it does contain useful information, and I find myself referring to it often.