bookreview - the book of Ruby

The book of Ruby by Huw Collingbourne

This book covers every part of Ruby that a newbie Ruby developer should know. It starts out with the basics around classes, objects, collections and moves over to more advanced stuff like threads and marshaling. Not only the language is covered: developing, debugging and the framework Rails are also explained to the reader. The book is full of example code snippets and good explanation. For the more experienced developers the author has added ‘digging deeper’ sections, that take you to more advanced topics. The book finishes of with more reading material and guidance around development tools.

The book has a subtitle telling us that this is ‘a hands-on guide for the adventurous’. That sure does sound promising. Unfortunately, the book does not read as a ‘hands-on guide’. It reads more like a reference manual. There are no assignments to practice the language and the examples are short. It misses a real life example that is build from start to end. You would expect some real application coming from a hands-on guide. The book self is well written and reads very easily, but the ‘reference manual’ style makes it somewhat boring.

I definitely recommend this book to people starting in Ruby, but not as a first book. Start with a real hands-on book that walks you to the creation of a basic application. Then pick up this book and walk to all the different topics. That will give you a good understanding of Ruby.

Find the book at http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781593272944/

Disclaimer: I have joined the O’Reilly Blogger Review Program (http://oreilly.com/bloggers/). It means that I receive free books that I review. I am not forced to write nice things, so this review is an honest one.