Ruby Way, The: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming

Hal Fulton gives a good and maybe one of the most complete expositions on Ruby programming style. There are a surprising high number of idioms.

I've cherished my old dog-eared 2nd edition (pub. 2006) of The Ruby Way for many years now, but had typically withheld my recommendation of the book to new(er) Rubyists because the old editions left off with v1.8, possibly leaving more than a few new-to-coding folks a bit befuddled about comparatively minor version-dependencies and related issues.So, I was overjoyed to find this new 3rd edition, fully updated to Ruby v2.x! When my copy arrived, I was further elated to find that Fulton, together with his current co-author, André Arko, have taken the time and effort to fully update the book's content and organization -- far from "just a few tweaks" to justify cashing in on another edition, this new 3rd edition of The Ruby Way provides thoughtful, timely and relevant content, faithful to the style, purpose and quality of the earlier editions, but even better in so many ways.As an example, the authors' presentation of the basic issues of "Internationalization in Ruby" (comprising chapter 4) is one of the best expositions of, or about, this complex topic. Fulton and Arko neatly summarize the essential problem, provide the motivation for why-do-it, introduce several approaches to multi-language design, and neatly highlight the basic Ruby approach and tools for implementing I18N in a project or product. This chapter alone is worth the price of this edition.Other strong and valuable chapters include the ones on regexes (chapter 3), working with date and time data (chapter 7), enumerables and other advanced data structures (chapters 8, 9 and 10), a practical overview of GUI toolkits for Ruby (12), a great getting-started chapter on scripting and sys-admin with Ruby (14)... Well, there's really not a dud in the whole book.With the earlier editions, Fulton emphasized that The Ruby Way was never intended to be a Ruby language primer or beginner's/learner's training guide; instead the focus was (and remains) on language idiom, best practices, and practical guidance on the application of Ruby to problems both generic and specific. In this, I think he and Arko have succeeded again -- other reviewers generally and enthusiastically agree with this. And now that this new, updated edition of The Ruby Way is available, it goes back on my own list of the top-essential books about Ruby. Warmly recommended to anyone interested in this great language.

simply owsome.

Good Book in OOP concepts for Ruby language

I am learning Ruby and this book is one of the pair suggested for Ruby students (who are not otherwise beginners). I have also purchased the other one, which is now being shipped. The other one is Programming Ruby, which is also available on Amazon.Ruby may well prove to be right up my alley, since I have worked with extensible software (two meta-assembles, one for the Univac 1107 and one I wrote myself -- PLASM and also a compiler generator from a BNF language description.).