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Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series

The Ruby Way, Adobe Reader

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"The Ruby Way" assumes that the reader is already familiar with the subject matter. Using many code samples it focuses on "how-to use Ruby" for specific applications, either as a stand-alone language, or in conjunction with other languages.

Topics covered include:


Simple data tasks; Manipulating structured data; External data manipulation; User interfaces; Handling threads; System programming; Network and web programming; Tools and utilities. Note: The appendices offer instruction on migrating from Perl and Python to Ruby, and extending Ruby in C and C++.

598 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2001

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About the author

Hal Fulton

6 books1 follower
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.

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5 stars
86 (25%)
4 stars
154 (45%)
3 stars
80 (23%)
2 stars
13 (3%)
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3 (<1%)
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
421 reviews84 followers
January 4, 2013
A mediocre, outdated, verbose book about the Ruby programming language.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,
Profile Image for Kiril Kirilov.
110 reviews16 followers
October 2, 2015
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.
Profile Image for Avdi.
Author 4 books254 followers
February 9, 2009
Bar none, the most essential book on the established Rubyist's bookshelf.
Profile Image for Michael Paulini.
20 reviews1 follower
January 5, 2022
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.
7 reviews
March 23, 2015
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.
Profile Image for Jesse.
17 reviews3 followers
October 13, 2007
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.
Profile Image for Nick Carter.
32 reviews2 followers
February 22, 2012
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!
5 reviews7 followers
January 24, 2008
Good nuts and bolts view of Ruby (a programming language) with lots of examples. Good for Ruby programmers looking to become advanced Ruby programmers.
18 reviews1 follower
April 18, 2008
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 . . .
5 reviews1 follower
July 8, 2014
A great, if not slightly out of date, guide to writing idiomatic ruby.

I enjoyed the author's conversational style.
Profile Image for Daniel Tinivella.
5 reviews1 follower
August 17, 2009
is a great explanation for planning and management in rubyonrails drivers of all kinds, for example controller model depot ....class and hashes.
Profile Image for Artur Sabirov.
60 reviews5 followers
August 23, 2011
Очень подробная книга по рельсам. Дало повод поковыряться в недрах самого фреймворка. Читал правда 4ю редакцию.
Profile Image for Joel.
22 reviews4 followers
October 25, 2012


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.
Profile Image for Steven.
Author 1 book63 followers
June 11, 2018
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.
Profile Image for Naum.
163 reviews20 followers
March 22, 2015
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).
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews

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