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Ruby Cookbook 1st (first) edition Text Only

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Excellent Book

Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

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About the author

Lucas Carlson

14 books161 followers
Lucas Carlson is a bestselling novelist. He takes his first-hand experiences as an entrepreneur and computer programmer, and turns them into thrillers that pack a punch and are hard to put down.

His writing has often been compared to Michael Crichton, Joseph Finder, Harlan Coben and Blake Crouch. They deal with technology and business themes and how they affect society.

Carlson lives in San Diego with his family.

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5 stars
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52 (26%)
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
422 reviews84 followers
February 15, 2012
This enormous book provides tons of ready-made Ruby code snippets for common and not-so-common problems. With books this big, I usually suspect the author of wasting words, but not this one. It just covers a ton of stuff, everything I could fathom anyone would want to use the language for, including object-oriented programming, metaprogramming, MIDI, XML, HTML, graphics, databases, persistence, internet services, web development (Ruby on Rails), web services, distributed programming, debugging, testing, optimizing, testing, packaging, automation, multitasking, multithreading, GUI, command line interfaces, C extensions, and system administration. Like I said, EVERYTHING.

Each solution also comes with a thorough discussion, which really helps you understand the solution in-depth. These "recipes" aren't intended to document everything completely, but to give you a good understanding of it, and tell you where to look for more information. They're like mini-tutorials. Plus, this book also provides fun little tricks that aren't necessarily useful, but really interesting. These are like dessert recipes.

The best part is, most everything in this book is well-written and easy to follow. Things I thought I'd already understood, this book helped me understand better, and it really got me a lot more comfortable reading Ruby code. The book is also arranged in a very logical way. I think this is the perfect reference manual, not only for syntax, but also for how to solve problems. And yet, despite its enormous size and excellence as a reference, it's also surprisingly easy to just read cover-to-cover.
Profile Image for Ash Moran.
79 reviews40 followers
January 30, 2010
I've lost count of the number of times I've tried to find an answer to a Ruby problem on the net and found it in here. Great examples on a wide range of topics, from the core language, to the stand library, to common gems. It could do with updating in places, but 80% of if it gold.
Profile Image for John Orman.
685 reviews32 followers
July 13, 2012
A very large O'Reilly book covering many standard Ruby techniques. Many code snippets listed, but no CD/DVD included. The book can be accessed online for a limited time, guess you could cut code segments from there and run them in your test programs. I used the book for my online class in Cloud Computing/Ruby on Rails. Useful in working on a few assignments.
Profile Image for Sunny.
63 reviews2 followers
January 10, 2010
Ruby par l'exemple by Lucas Carlson (2006)
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews

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