Ruby Developers Guide

Ruby is together with python the new star at the programmingsky. no more ugly pointers, no memory management and Rubyhas a big and powerful high level standard library.this book has lots of useful stuff in it. I liked especiallythe chapters on DBI, SOAP and Performace. The Rexml partcould have been bigger in the XML chapter, but when the bookwas 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 knowwhat the are talking about.

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.