by Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt

Simon was reading a book called Beyond Java a couple of weeks ago and was telling me about Ruby, a programming language that generates quite a lot of hype on the web these days. I already had interest in the language (the interpreter was already installed on my PC at work) because I think it’s always a good idea to learn new things. It keeps my brain active and alert. So I decided to get a book because there was some concepts in Ruby that were not obvious to me. I went to a Chapters store, looked at a few books, then went back home and ordered one online (because Chapters’ online store’s prices are much better than the price they have in their real stores.) I picked Programming Ruby, The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide, mostly because it’s written by the same authors that gave us The Pragmatic Programmer (a book you really should read if you are a programmer, no matter what is your favorite programming language or level of expertise.)

The book is a good read. The authors start with the premise that you already know how to program in an object-oriented language or two, so they don’t spend too much time on explaining the for loop. Their examples are short and efficient. The first few chapters concentrate on what make Ruby a unique OO programming language and a bit of syntax so you will be able to understand the rest of the book. This is not a tutorial and definitivly not the book you would be looking for if you want to learn your first programming language.

The rest of the book cover more advanced programming topics like multi-threading, networking, etc. and ends with a large appendix describing the language’s core objects and their methods. This is a good reference book, although I usually prefer online reference because of the search capabilities. The book doesn’t come with the CTRL-F buttons to perform a search… and life doesn’t come with the CTRL-Z buttons to perform a undo when you do something stupid. But this is a different story.

Note: I was really surprised when learning how to get going with Ruby on my Mac. The solution is really simple: do nothing, as Ruby is already installed on Mac OS X by default. That’s nice!

Tags Technorati : book review | ruby | pragmatic programmer | programming language | mac os x | dave thomas | chad fowler | andy hunt

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Lectures by Alexandre Lemieux