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| The Ruby Programming Language | 
| Authors: David Flanagan, Yukihiro Matsumoto
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $12.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (19 reviews)
Sales Rank: 8087
Format: Illustrated
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 446
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.9 x 1.1
ISBN: 0596516177
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.117
EAN: 9780596516178
ASIN: 0596516177
Publication Date: January 25, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Makes Dave Thomas look bad... Well... Worse than he normally does. July 20, 2008
3 out of 8 found this review helpful
Very, very dense reading, but very complete as well. Aspects of the language that were only glanced over (or even ignored entirely) by the "pickaxe" book are covered in great detail. The only downside is that you have to look at several of those horrible high school notebook doodles the wannabe Murakami "Why" produces whenever people convince him that he's either "clever" or "talented."
Worthy of comparison to K&R June 17, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is well written, well organized, and covers the whole core language. It isn't a cookbook, and it isn't an API reference, but for what it is, it's excellent.
The organization makes sense, the index is usable, and the writing is precise enough to leave no ambiguity.
My only complaint would be too much space spent on differences between 1.8.6 and 1.9, and too much attention to text encodings.
Quite possibly the be all and end all of Ruby books May 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
For a long time now Dave Thomas' Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide, Second Edition (aka. The Pickaxe) has been the standard in the Ruby community as the book to learn Ruby from. Unfortunately the Pickaxe is not the best programming book ever written. In fact, its bulk and slowness almost killed my inspiration to learn Ruby. I respect Dave Thomas a lot for what he does for the Ruby community but the Pickaxe and I just did not click.
Since I didn't find the Pickaxe to be excellent reading material, I had been eagerly anticipating David Flanagan's The Ruby Programming Language to come out and unseat The Pickaxe as the de facto book to recommend to newcomers to Ruby.
I am happy to say that The Ruby Programming Language did not disappoint. I picked up this book solely expecting to just review it since I already comfortable programming in Ruby. However, once I started reading the book I found myself frequently learning things about Ruby that I didn't know before. Not like little things either like, "oh that's interesting". I'm talking significant things like "holy crap that's sweet!".
This book covers both Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9. Initially this concerned me because as impressive as it is, it must have been quite a headache for the authors and was not sure how they were going to pull it off. It turns out to be pretty much a non-issue. The authors make a note of what is 1.8 or 1.9 only and it does not disturb the flow of the book since it doesn't come up too frequently. I do hope though that after Ruby 1.9 stable is released they upgrade the book and tear out all the 1.8 specific material. Since I currently use 1.8 on a daily basis I don't mind having 1.8 material in there but after everything has shifted to 1.9 it would be rather irksome.
The style of the book is fairly straightforward. It starts with an introduction to how Ruby programs work and then goes into an explanation of Ruby datatypes and objects. The later chapters cover advanced topics like reflection and metaprogramming. The authors opted not to go the tutorial route, which I think, was a good approach since the book is not designed to be an "intro to programming" text.
In the preface of the book, the authors state:
> [The Ruby Programming Language] is loosely modeled after the classic C Programming Language (2nd Edition) (Prentice Hall Software) by Kernighan and Ritchie and aims to document the Ruby language comprehensively but without the formality of a language specification. It is written for experienced programmers who are new to Ruby, and for current Ruby programmers who want to take their understanding and mastery of the language to the next level.
O'Reilly is hoping that The Ruby Programming Language becomes the equivalent of K&R's The C Programming Language for Ruby and I hope it succeeds. I think that every language needs their own K&R book for people to turn to as the definitive authority. That's something that I feel like the Java programming language never had and it creates something of a hurdle when browsing for a Java book.
The third edition of the Pickaxe is in beta and will be coming out soon. I really hope it makes a strong showing when it hits the press because after the bangup job Flanagan and Matz did with The Ruby Programming Language, there is no reason to look at the Pickaxe till then.
Excellent, but should not be used as a tutorial May 19, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is an excellent reference book on Ruby, if you already know Ruby this book will help you a lot, but if you are looking for a tutorial on Ruby this book should not be your first choice.
Great! April 17, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book (TRPL) represents a great alternative for those who are not entirely satisfied with the "Pickaxe", as it goes into much more detail in some areas of Ruby. After reading both books, my general impression is that the Pickaxe can be seen as a lighter reference and TRPL as a more in-depth description. In that sense they complement each other. Make no mistake, though: this book is not a comprehensive reference for the standard library (just as "The C programming language" is not a complete reference for the C standard library).
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