 See larger picture | Ruby Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly))
by
Lucas Carlson and Leonard Richardson
- O'Reilly Media, Inc.List Price: $49.99
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Product Description Do you want to push Ruby to its limits? The Ruby Cookbook is the most comprehensive problem-solving guide to today's hottest programming language. It gives you hundreds of solutions to real-world problems, with clear explanations and thousands of lines of code you can use in your own projects. From data structures and algorithms, to integration with cutting-edge technologies, the Ruby Cookbook has something for every programmer. Beginners and advanced Rubyists alike will learn how to program with: - Strings and numbers
- Arrays and hashes
- Classes, modules, and namespaces
- Reflection and metaprogramming
- XML and HTML processing
- Ruby on Rails (including Ajax integration)
- Databases
- Graphics
- Internet services like email, SSH, and BitTorrent
- Web services
- Multitasking
- Graphical and terminal interfaces
If you need to write a web application, this book shows you how to get started with Rails. If you're a system administrator who needs to rename thousands of files, you'll see how to use Ruby for this and other everyday tasks. You'll learn how to read and write Excel spreadsheets, classify text with Bayesian filters, and create PDF files. We've even included a few silly tricks that were too cool to leave out, like how to blink the lights on your keyboard. The Ruby Cookbook is the most useful book yet written about Ruby. When you need to solve a problem, don't reinvent the wheel: look it up in the Cookbook.
Featured Customer Reviews  Good Stuff,
May 28, 2008 Why not!,
February 06, 2008
Is not a "must" but it is a good resource for many of us.Another great Cookbook from O'Reilly,
January 26, 2008 As with most O'Reilly cookbooks, Ruby Cookbook has two main avenues of exploration: the core of the language, and an introduction to some of the more important libraries, presented as the solutions to a series of themed tasks and problems the working programmer might face.
Coverage of the likes of XML, databases, networking, web services is all present as you'd expect, but I always enjoy the exploration of the core language the most, especially as it applies to strings, arrays and hashes, where the idioms and 'zen' of programming in a language are normally revealed. Ruby Cookbook excels in this area, but it also provides a very solid grounding in Ruby's object system, namespaces/modules and blocks. The basics of Ruby's metaprogramming and reflective abilities are also well enumerated, although the recipe-like structure of the book doesn't quite communicate the 'magic' behaviour that pervasive Ruby metaprogramming (exemplified by Rails, of course) conjures.
If you've read Perl Cookbook, rest assured that the Ruby version is easily as good, although as you might expect, in the latter half of the book there's less emphasis in Ruby Cookbook on low level networking and sysadmin work and more on higher level libraries. That said, the chapter on Rails felt a bit superfluous.
This book is well-written and thorough, and would be a great second Ruby book (The Pickaxe being the obvious example for a first book). It has some interesting things to say about performance for some of the techniques it describes, although given how many different Ruby runtimes there are and how quickly they're progressing, it's difficult to say how relevant these will stay. Some of the examples are even quite amusing. Unless you were hoping for some truly in-depth metaprogramming detail, you'd be hard pressed to find anything wrong with Ruby Cookbook, except for the fact that it's competing with established Ruby must-read The Ruby Way, which covers very similar ground, in a very similar style. You don't need both books, and I preferred The Ruby Way. Nonetheless, this stands on its own as a great Ruby book.This One's Just Right,
January 19, 2008 Great stuff. I suggest this book for a first look at Ruby over and above Programming Ruby and Agile Web Development. If you're already a coder, this book will put Ruby in context of essential problems that you typically solve in whatever language you're called to use in your day-to-day work. This is this book's strength. It's not the deepest look at Ruby, and it's not a replacement for The Ruby Way or Programming Ruby, but it might get you into the groove faster by leveraging common programming tasks and their representations in Ruby code.full explanations, thorough examples, good reference,
October 17, 2007 i found ruby cookbook is a good read for learning ruby, provides good thorough explanations of the topics, and gives great examples as well. if you want a good dummies book to get you going, this is not the book for you. if you want an encyclopedic reference 1000 pages long, look elsewhere. but this is a great happy medium.
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