The Open Source Zone

After having just finished reading the excellent "Programming in C" by Stephen Kochan, I find "Programming Ruby" a bit lackluster. Like a previous reveiwer noted, the Jukebox example in the beginning several chapters is contrived, and frankly, annoying. Many of the code snippets are dependent on one another and it's not intuitive to figure out how they all come together to make a program, especially when one snippet is given and then an alternate is immediately provided - neither of which can exist independently.

I'd be more interested in a straight-forward and thorough approach. For example, the use of symbols is a little confusing (that partly appears to just be Ruby). In the introduction "notation" section, the use of the '#' versus the "." to differentiate types of methods just really got me off on the wrong foot - particularly when it was noted that one notation would be used despite it being invalid Ruby syntax. From that point on I had a bit of symbol overload trying to figure out what the '@', '@@', '#@', '#@@', '$', etc. meant. At one point, a string is referred to as "[#@lyrics]". The brackets were meant to be printed literally and had no programmatic meaning, but just seeing that typed made me do a double take trying to figure out what the square brackets were supposed to indicate. To answer, nothing.

I intend to complete this book, because I can foresee that the knowledge of the language will be worth it. I'm hoping the next edition can draw the reader in a bit better and will provide the information in a more thorough and consistent manner.

Sorry but to me this book is not that good. I feel like the authors lack real programming experience. The JukeBox example seems out of a bad OO book, and I found few real-life examples.
As a comparison I also recently red 'Dive into Python' from M. Pilgrim and wow! the difference was striking. I wish I could find a book like that on Ruby.

I ordered this book, which was listed in like new condition. I received this book very quickly. I am very happy with the condition and the speed of delivery on this book. I would buy another book from this user.

The first part contains a great introduction to the language. The author walks through a great tutorial for building a jukebox application making the concepts of the language very clear.

Now as a reference, the second part, I find myself referring to the book several times a day during development. The reference section also has fairly decent examples and explanations that are clear and not so technically puffed up so that a normal human like me can understand.

Of course it's not meant for someone trying to learn to program, but after learning a few of the basics of programming, one can appreciate the elegance of Ruby.

There are books which are good and that you occasionally turn to for information. And then there are books that are always sitting on your desk, at the ready with dog-eared pages and multiple bookmarks sticking out.
This book falls into the latter category.