The Ruby Way

This book is a bit more advanced than the "Dave & Andy" book(Programming Ruby), but is well worth getting, whether as your first or second Ruby book. I has an amazing collection of simple but extremely useful "How to do (your common algorithm here)" pages that are a godsend to intermediate programmers like me. It also has a wealth of insight into advanced and esoteric language aspects. As a scientist, I really appreciated the author's objective and deep analysis of language topics. This is one of the best language books I've ever bought. If you're not comfortable reading about OO language topics, or if you're fairly new to computer languages in general, consider buying the "Programming Ruby" book as well, or instead. It's a more gentle introduction, and a great book, too.

I had previously read the fine book: Programming Ruby by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt, but didn't learn enough that I could apply Ruby without a struggle. This book flattened the learning curve just enough that it made writing useful Ruby code fun. The examples are excellent. The writing is clear. If you want to learn Ruby buy this book.

This book is very good. It covers a lot of important and interesting topics like Ruby's OOP featurs, Gtk+, Fox, Threads, Network Programming and more. The Text is easy to follow and the examples are also easy to understand. Most of the stuff is presented in a "How do I XYZ" manner which makes the book ideal for looking up all the things a Ruby programmer needs while working with this wonderful programming language. In my opionon a must have for any Ruby Fan.

The Ruby Way is actually more of a cookbook, containing numerous code examples for using Ruby to accomplish little tasks, and so highlighting the features and capabilities of the language. As the author points out, this is not a book for the absolute beginner, although folks who have some scripting experience and an awareness of the object-orientedness of Ruby (and know what that means) will be able to figure alot out just by reading the code examples.In such a large volume, Fulton is able to explore subjects at greater depth than some of the other Ruby books. He discusses object persistence, code that can introspectively examine it's own execution, Ruby and GUIs and even small chapters for Perl and Python users. This book helps the new Ruby scripters to become more comfortable with solving problems using Ruby's strengths.