Ruby Cookbook: Recipes for Object-Oriented Scripting

This cookbook is aimed at people who know at least a little bit of Ruby, or who know a fair amount about programming in general. This book isn't a Ruby tutorial, but if you're already familiar with a few other programming languages, you should be able to pick up Ruby by going through the first 10 chapters of this book. This book contains recipes suitable for all skill levels. It focuses mainly on generic programming techniques, but it also covers specific application frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and GUI libraries, as well as best practices such as unit testing. I discuss the book further in the context of the table of contents: The book starts with six chapters covering Ruby's built-in data structures. Chapter 1, Strings, contains recipes for building, processing, and manipulating strings of text. There are a few recipes specifically applicable to regular expressions (Recipes 1.17, 1.18, and 1.19). Chapter 2, Numbers, covers the representation of different types of numbers: real numbers, complex numbers, arbitrary-precision decimals, and so on. It also includes Ruby implementations of common mathematical and statistical algorithms, and explains some Ruby quirks you'll run into if you create your own numeric types (Recipes 2.13 and 2.14). Chapter 3, Date and Time, covers Ruby's two interfaces for dealing with time: the one based on the C time library, which may be familiar to you from other programming languages, and the one implemented in pure Ruby, which is more idiomatic. Chapter 4, Arrays, introduces the array, Ruby's simplest compound data type. Chapter 5, Hashes, covers the hash, Ruby's other basic compound data type. Chapter 6, Files and Directories, covers techniques for reading, writing, and manipulating files. This chapter also covers Ruby's standard libraries for searching and manipulating the filesystem. The next four are more abstract and are about Ruby idiom and philosophy. Chapter 7, Code Blocks and Iteration, contains recipes that explore the possibilities of Ruby's code blocks, also known as closures. Chapter 8, Objects and Classes, contains recipes for writing different types of classes and methods, and a few recipes that demonstrate capabilities of all Ruby objects such as freezing and cloning. Chapter 9, Modules and Namespaces, covers Ruby's modules. These constructs are used to "mix" new behavior into existing classes and to segregate functionality into different namespaces. Chapter 10, Reflection and Metaprogramming, covers techniques for programatically exploring and modifying Ruby class definitions. The next three chapters talk about specific file formats and Ruby. Chapter 11, XML and HTML, shows how to handle the most popular data interchange formats. The chapter deals mostly with parsing other people's XML documents and web pages (see Recipe 11.9). Chapter 12, Graphics and Other File Formats, covers data interchange formats other than XML and HTML, with a special focus on generating and manipulating

I've looked at a couple programming "cookbooks" over the few years I've been programming, and none have ever really captured my attention. Most of them I found were lacking in useful recipes for novice programmers, or the recipes used an outdated code style or covered specific areas of a programming language. And with others, I just found it difficult to find useful tips or tricks. The Ruby Cookbook however, provides fresh, easy to read recipes that are full of neat tips and awesome tricks. And it's all provided in an easy to read, and more importantly easy to find, format. Programmers from novice to highly experienced will find this book useful. The book is laid out using general data types as chapters at first, then moves into more abstract topics such as code blocks and modules; databases and persistence; web services and task automation with Rake. Start with the table of contents to learn about a specific area, or thumb your way through the index to find specific topics or that fast piece of code you need to complete your project. No matter how you use it, the Ruby Cookbook is a must have book for any Ruby or Ruby on Rails programmer.

Sometimes, the difference between getting a project off the ground and watching it linger on the launchpad is finding an example of how to do something in code. Perhaps you're working on a project and you'd like to send an email using Ruby. Maybe you'd like to know how to read and write zip files or create thumbnail images from full size graphics files. Sometimes cruising through the API documentation just doesn't quite give you enough info. The Ruby Cookbook fills the void for a portable version of a Ruby code snippet search engine. For each example, there is a 'Problem' description, a 'Solution' section containing one or more chunks of Ruby code and a 'Discussion' section for follow-up. Most examples also have a 'See Also' section for cross reference. A huge amount of material is covered. Topics range from simple stuff like strings, numbers, hashes, arrays and objects to more challenging subjects like code blocks, reflection, metaprogramming and multithreading. It has chapters on Internet services, Web services and distributed programming, and Web development with Ruby on Rails. I'm only just skimming the surface here, this is a big book with 873 pages. It is quite simply packed with goodies. There is something in this book for Ruby programmers at every level. The book is well written and easy to read. You can download a zip file containing all of the code samples from the O'Reilly website. If you want to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails, there are three books that will help you more than anything else: Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas, Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson and the Ruby Cookbook by Lucas Carlson and Leonard Richardson.

Some O'Reilly books are horrible, and some are great--this happens to be one of the better ones. It's full of concise examples of how to use Ruby's standard libraries and most popular extensions that more than make up for their frequently terrible and always unnavigable RubyDoc generated documentation. An excellent next step for those who've read through "Programming Ruby" and are wondering how to put the language's better features to good use without becoming completely dependent on any of the currently popular application frameworks I'd guess about 90% of people are learning Ruby for. It even covers RubyCocoa basics. I have found a couple typos here and there, but mostly just misplaced spaces and omitted words; nothing dangerous so far.

One of the greatest challenges to Ruby development was the lack of coherent resource base that development teams can refer to. There are great resources online but these have been mostly snippets of information located in various places. Ruby Cookbook follows the O'Reilly 'cookbook tradition and has good reference touch points to developers. This book help launch a Ruby project worked on by multiple teams in separate locations. Having a common reference point greatly aided in the delivery of the project. Ruby is fun to work with and with the Ruby Cookbook, it makes it easier to deliver on a project.