Comments about oreilly Ruby Cookbook:

Published by acclaimed authors Lucas Carlson and Leonard Richardson, The Ruby Cookbook is both 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 prefer most about the 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.

Comments about oreilly Ruby Cookbook:

This book is a must-have for any programmer just discovering Ruby. The examples are straight forward and relevant. Combine this with a good Rails book and you have just what you need to get started on a serious project.

Comments about oreilly Ruby Cookbook:

This book is excellent. If it had more swing stuff I'd probably be using it exclusively.

Comments about oreilly Ruby Cookbook:

I've looked at a couple programming "cookbooks" over the few years I've been programming, and none have ever really captured my attention. Most of them I found were lacking in useful recipes for novice programmers, or the recipes used an outdated code style or covered specific areas of a programming language. And with others, I just found it difficult to find useful tips or tricks.

The Ruby Cookbook however, provides fresh, easy to read recipes that are full of neat tips and awesome tricks. And it's all provided in an easy to read, and more importantly easy to find, format. Programmers from novice to highly experienced will find this book useful.

The book is laid out using general data types as chapters at first, then moves into more abstract topics such as code blocks and modules; databases and persistence; web services and task automation with Rake.

Start with the table of contents to learn about a specific area, or thumb your way through the index to find specific topics or that fast piece of code you need to complete your project. No matter how you use it, the Ruby Cookbook is a must have book for any Ruby or Ruby on Rails programmer.

Comments about oreilly Ruby Cookbook:

Sometimes, the difference between getting a project off the ground and watching it linger on the launchpad is finding an example of how to do something in code.

Perhaps you're working on a project and you'd like to send an email using Ruby. Maybe you'd like to know how to read and write zip files or create thumbnail images from full size graphics files. Sometimes cruising through the API documentation just doesn't quite give you enough info.

The Ruby Cookbook fills the void for a portable version of a Ruby code snippet search engine. For each example, there is a Problem description, a Solution section containing one or more chunks of Ruby code and a Discussion section for follow-up. Most examples also have a See Also section for cross reference.

A huge amount of material is covered. Topics range from simple stuff like strings, numbers, hashes, arrays and objects to more challenging subjects like code blocks, reflection, metaprogramming and multithreading. It has chapters on Internet services, Web services and distributed programming, and Web development with Ruby on Rails.

I'm only just skimming the surface here, this is a big book with 873 pages. It is quite simply packed with goodies. There is something in this book for Ruby programmers at every level. The book is well written and easy to read. You can download a zip file containing all of the code samples from the O'Reilly website.

If you want to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails, there are three books that will help you more than anything else: Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas, Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson and the Ruby Cookbook by Lucas Carlson and Leonard Richardson.

Comments about oreilly Ruby Cookbook:

This book is a 'must-have' for all the Ruby enthusiasts. I hope they put up a .zip file of all the programs here.

Comments about oreilly Ruby Cookbook:

Super book from Beginers to Advanced.