The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton

Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series

by Hal Fulton

Ruby is an agile object-oriented language, borrowing some of the best features from LISP, Smalltalk, Perl, CLU, and other languages. Its popularity has grown tremendously in the five years since the first edition of this book.The Ruby Way takes a “how-to” approach to Ruby programming with the bulk of the material consisting of more than 400 examples arranged by topic. Each example answers the question “How do I do this in Ruby?” Working along with the author, you are presented with the task description and a discussion of the technical constraints. This is followed by a step-by-step presentation of one good solution. Along the way, the author provides detailed commentary and explanations to aid your understanding.Coverage includesAn overview of Ruby, explaining terminology and basic principlesOperations on low-level data types (numbers, strings, regular expressions, dates)The new regular expression engine (Oniguruma)Internationalization (I18N) and message catalogs in RubyOperations on hashes, arrays, and other data structures such as stacks, trees, and graphsWorking with general I/O, files, and persistent objectsDatabase coverage including MySQL, SQLite, Oracle, DBI, and moreRuby-specific techniques in OOP and dynamic programmingGraphical interfaces in Ruby (Tk, GTK+, Fox, and Qt)Working with Ruby threads for lightweight multitaskingEveryday scripting and system administration in RubyWorking with image files, PDFs, YAML, XML, RSS, and AtomTesting, debugging, profiling, and packaging Ruby codeLow-level network programming and client-server interactionWeb development tools including Rails, Nitro, Wee, IOWA, and moreWorking with distributed Ruby, Rinda, and RingRuby development tools such as IDEs, documentation tools, and moreThe source code for the book can be downloaded from www.rubyhacker.comHal Fulton has worked for over 15 years with variousforms of Unix, including AIX, Solaris, and Linux. He was first exposed to Ruby in 1999, and in 2001 he began work on the first edition of this book–the second Ruby book published in the English language. He has attendednumerous Ruby conferences and has given presentations at several of those, including the first European Ruby Conference.He has two degrees in computer science from the University of Mississippi and taught computer science for four years before moving to Austin, Texas to work as a contractor for variouscompanies, including IBM Austin. Hal currently works at Broadwing Communications in Austin, Texas, maintaining a large data warehouse and related telecom applications, working daily with C++, Oracle, and, of course, Ruby.

Genres: Programming, Technology, Nonfiction, Software, Coding, Computer Science, Computers

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Hal Fulton is a software developer in real life; he has two degrees in computer science and is the author of "The Ruby Way". His passions are reading, writing, music, art, and theatre. He lives in Austin, Texas, in a condo located directly above the center of the Earth. His hobbies include live music and passing counterfeit bills to tourists. His short stories have been rejected by some of the finest magazines in the country.

Reviews

[Marshall · Rating 1 out of 5]

A mediocre, outdated, verbose book about the Ruby programming language. In 900 pages, this book covers anything any everything Ruby-related, going into (often excrutiating) detail about even the most arcane Ruby libraries. The code samples in this book are pretty bad examples of idiomatic, clean Ruby code. For example, he has a consistent habit of using rescue clauses with no exception names, a terrible practice which commonly leads to false-positives. Even syntax errors will be ignored! The explanations are pretty bad too. This book even confused me about concepts I'd already understood. This book may work as an okay cookbook, but you'd be better off just reading the Ruby Cookbook. It can also be used to discover some libraries you may have never heard of. But by all means, do NOT try to read this all the way through or, God forbid, use it to actually learn Ruby,

[Kiril Kirilov · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was expecting to get laid. So I decided to clean my room. Under all the filth I found something. An artefact from times long gone. This book. I started it at least two years ago, and never finished it. ‘I can’t leave it that way, I will read it right away’. And now, I’ve done it. Yay.

The moral of this: Do not read this book if you want to get laid.

[Avdi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bar none, the most essential book on the established Rubyist's bookshelf.

[Michael Paulini · Rating 4 out of 5]

On one hand a bit outdated and verbose, on the other hand it explains common solutions to the usual task very well. A bit like the perl cookbook with better writing.

[Ylan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably one of the most well-known books among rubyists, "The Ruby Way" by Hal Fulton with André Arko, has now been updated and released in its third edition. The first part of the book is dedicated to the language itself and covers syntax, semantics, some comparison to other languages and specific issues, like garbage collection, that developers are well served to know when writing ruby.

The majority of the book is divided into sections that deal with specific task that a developer may encounter. From basics like working with String, numerical calculations and Enumerable collections to more advanced techniques like Threads and Concurrency, Metaprogramming, Network Programming and Distributed Ruby. Each chapter has plenty of code examples and thorough explanations.

I expect my copy to get plenty of used as my programming takes me to unknown or forgotten parts of ruby.

[Jesse · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not a particularly useful reference or tutorial. Fulton concentrates on canned "recipes" for solving specific problems; really all you can do is try to generalize from these approaches. His choices of problems to solve seem rather questionable (finding Easter, for instance) and he doesn't spend much time talking about best practices in Ruby, so it's ultimately just a bunch of scripts that won't be relevant to most people.

[Nick Carter · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this is packed to the brim with sage advice, it could use some reorg.

That being said, it *is* a cookbook-style book, which I don't normally enjoy so much as I appreciate as quick reference.

Wish I had as ebook!

[Javan · Rating 3 out of 5]

good reference

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good nuts and bolts view of Ruby (a programming language) with lots of examples. Good for Ruby programmers looking to become advanced Ruby programmers.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ruby is a great language, but finding a good Ruby book is tricky. Hopefully this is the one that will make it all make sense . . .

[Kenneth Bowen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great, if not slightly out of date, guide to writing idiomatic ruby.

I enjoyed the author's conversational style.

[Daniel Tinivella · Rating 5 out of 5]

is a great explanation for planning and management in rubyonrails drivers of all kinds, for example controller model depot ....class and hashes.

[Artur Sabirov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Очень подробная книга по рельсам. Дало повод поковыряться в недрах самого фреймворка. Читал правда 4ю редакцию.

[Joel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the book that made me get ruby. I had read a couple of books before but this really got the concepts through to me.

[Robert Postill · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's an interesting almanac of tips for programming ruby. I doubt you'd read it cover-to-cover but still handy.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Looooong

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good for the Ruby programmer who wants to improve their programming skills by directed learning. Not such a good book for the casual Rails developer.

[Naum · Rating 4 out of 5]

An update to my favorite book on the Ruby programming language.

Pleasantly surprised that it was suitably formatted for Kindle reading (most all programming books get this wrong).

[Aung Myat]

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