waveninja said
I bought this book on a shopping spree. Just needed a 3rd book to add to my shopping basket for a '3 = 2' promotion, it had good reviews so I bought it.
Ruby Cookbook
This book is not a straightforward learning book. It contains just a whole lot of 'recipes', small solutions for common problems. This book is not meant to be read in your bed from beginning to end. Rather it's something to grab on to when you want to do something but don't know how. Each chapter deals with a certain topic such as system administration, GUI's, multitasking, testing, webservices, Rake, databases, Internet services, Rails, metaprogramming and a whole lot of more basic language recipe's such as matching strings with regular expressions or comparing floating point numbers. It's a big fat book with nearly 900 pages.
Conclusion
Well, this is somewhat difficult as it's not a book to read from beginning to end. When I used the book, I have always found the solution for my problem in no time. It just covers a whole lot things. The recipes are short and clear and contain references for further information. It's a really good book and writing this review I am actually surprised I have used it so little times. Since it's such a big book, and not something to read in one piece, It's easy to put on your shelf, forget about it and use Google for help, like I did. The fact is however, that in all cases I thought about the book, it provided the answer I needed.
Given that, this book's pretty efficient. It saves a lot of time providing solutions and you don't even have to read the whole thing. Personally I think this book comes not to it's right on the bookshelf, but more as a desktop companion. Consider a digital version to keep around and CRTL-F when in need.
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Andrei Mouravski said
Published by acclaimed authors Lucas Carlson and Leonard Richardson, The Ruby Cookbook is an excellent learning tool and reference manual. It is organized into 23 chapters delineating all capabilities of the object-oriented scripting language. Each chapter is broken down into numerous subcategories describing operations, tips and tricks, common problems and their solutions, and other concepts pertaining to the topic of the chapter. Finding what you are looking for is not an issue since all topics are structured seamlessly.
Unlike many other programming books I have read, this one does not cut corners and overlook the menial steps experts, such as the authors themselves, would assume the reader to know intuitively. I find this aspect to be exceedingly beneficial in learning how the language behaves and what discrepancies may present themselves as a result of coding between a number of programming languages. While reading this book and learning the language, I had never been confused as a result of missing or vague information. The writing style is captivating, concise, and understandable. I enjoyed reading this book.
What I like most about this manual is that it is suited for newbies as well as experts. The introductory topics include the common data structures and how they are implemented, while the later chapters specify advanced functionality and extensions to the language. I recommend this book for all of those who have had some object-oriented programming experience as well as to those who have not but are interested in learning a computing language.
Fernando Barajas said
Yes you can read online material but it's just not as good. The book really has some great content.
M. Veltri said
Not a simple cookbook (o'reilly is cool). A lot of usefull informations and several lines about the differences with some other languages (python, java)
Is not a "must" but it is a good resource for many of us.
Thing with a hook said
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.
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