The Open Source Zone

Thomas has written at least two books I like (haven't read all of his books and even this two I have not read all pages.), one is Programming Ruby, the other is Pragmatic programmers.

To tell the truth, I thought Programming Ruby is like Programming Pearls, which is
articles of some programming stuff. Only when I opened the book, I found out it is in fact a new langauge and very easy to get your hands on. Ruby is definitely a good language for developgin prototype; there are critics saying Ruby is just Python in disguise. They do have similarity; however, I like Ruby where a cleaner syntax is enforced. Hey... learn Python as well!

Is Ruby a good language, I bet it is... I used it in my serious work.

This book does an excellent job of describing most of the features of Ruby. However the examples of and describing the true power of some of Ruby's features. I found the material on blocks in particular to be troublesome to me. That is actually my biggest complaint about the book. Otherwise it is the best introductory book on Ruby out there.

I have been programming for more than twenty years. I have seen my fill of emergent languages that claim to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. Ruby truly is. It manages to combine the most important emergent programming techniques (e.g., iterators, closures, list comprehensions [although that actually dates back to the early 1960s, viz., LISP's "MAPCAR"]) into a thoughtfully conceived syntactic structure. I was astonished to find the pattern-slinging of Perl, the object orientation of Java (plus much stronger data structuring capabilities--something at which Java was always weak), and the generality of C--not to mention seamlessly integrated Tk GUI, UNIX shell (plus entire library of system calls and related "section 3" subroutines) support . Perhaps most remarkably, one can write Ruby programs at the bits-and-bytes level of a systems program or at the event-driven level of an interactive application. Like Ragu spaghetti sauce, "It's in there." (I could carp at some minor syntactic unpleasantries or some inconsistencies in naming conventions, but nothing's perfect.) Bravo, Matsumoto!

This is a sweet book. The first edition got me hooked on Ruby; this edition is even better. Explaining a programming language can be a tough task. The authors do an outstanding job of presenting both the gory details and the elegant underpinnings of the language.

Ruby is more accessible and easier to pick up than Python, Perl, or Java, with a cleaner, more intuitive design. The book will get into the language, guide you through syntax and style, and leave with good language comprehension.

The reference section can, at times, be a bit terse, but the due to the number of libraries that are built in to the language, a certain amount of brevity is required to keep the book to a manageable size. Distributed computing? Built in. XML parsing? Built in. HTTP server? Built in. Hell, you could almost write amazon.com in Ruby and never need a 3rd-party lib.

Get the book, and write code for the 21st century.

The authors have a wonderful style for introducting the lanaguage Ruby, assuming that you have at least a small amount of prior programming experience. The order of presentation and the amount of polish throughout made this a joy to read and introduces Ruby at a very rapid, yet comfortable, pace.<p>It does seem to suffer from wanting to be both an introduction to Ruby and a reference manual as well; the last several chapters look (and read like) reference materials. While I'm not opposed to that, the book doesn't have the kind of binding that lets it easily lay flat on your desk open to the page, so I'm more inclined to just open the docs on a separate monitor instead. The book might as well have been lighter and just had a pointer to docs online.<p>Also, I wonder if some of the presentations of concepts like closures and contiuations aren't a bit too rapid for the casual reader. If you've had a programming background in Scheme or Lisp, it's old hat; however, as I was reading through their presentations and the relatively quick examples, it felt likely that many readers wouldn't get a lot of the subtelty in what was going on under the hood to make the language features work or in what kinds of real world scenarios those sorts of features are useful.