Time for some knowledge sharing! My first book review is off course about a book on Ruby. In fact, it is on a book to learn (a bit) about Ruby. It caries the appropriate title "Learning Ruby". I read this book a while ago which actually helps in writing a good review. The impressions a book makes on the long run are the ones that count!So let's take a look at this book, and judge it by it's own promises shall we?
The promise
The reason I picked this book as my first Ruby book is the following text on the backside:
You don't have to know everything about a car to drive one, and you don't need to know everything about Ruby to start programming with it. Written for both experienced and new programmers alike, learning Ruby is a just-get-in-and-drive book--a hands-on tutorial that offers lots of Ruby programs and explains how and why they work, just enough to get you rolling down the road.
Great, exactly what I wanted. Just a quick peek at this Ruby thing I heard about. A taste to see if the hype-du-jour suits you. Enough to get you rolling down the road. Well let's look back at these promises and see if this book delivers shall we?
The delivery
Learning Ruby is a book of 11 Chapters written on 238 pages. The first two chapters provide a basic coverage and a quick tour on Ruby. Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 deal with the building blocks of a programming language. Things like loops, strings, math, array's and hashes. Small samples of code demonstrate the various techniques that are covered. Chapter 8 handles the working with files. Chapter 9 covers classes, modules, inheritance and other Object Orientation techniques. Chapter 10 focusses on various practical things like rdoc, RubyGems, REXML and exception handling.
A bit of a surprise was chapter 11, which is about Rails. Rails is a web development framework that was written in Ruby.
The verdict
Learning Ruby is a small book, it's only 238 pages. If you think about it, this is quite unique for a book about computer stuff. Especially programming books have the bad habit of having at least 600 pages. I'm not a big fan of big books. First of all, they don't handle. They are heavy too. And, well there is just too much information in them! Try reading such a book in some busy public transport carriage, or find that you need to carry a backpack only because you want to bring along your book, pure evil!
The book covers most basic things, it gives a good feeling about what Ruby is and what it can do for you. The examples were short, which is a good thing because you will try them all yourself. A drawback is that they are not really functional by themselves. Most of the examples worked too! There was a chapter on GUI coding using TK, but these examples did not seem to work for me. The topics the book covers are mostly standard things programming books cover, with the exception of chapter10. I'm not a big fan of how programming books always cover basic things like strings, arrays and arithmetic. But ok, this book also focuses on newcomers to programming. More experienced programmers will appreciate the fact that the chapters are small, but do in fact explain certain Ruby aspects in depth. Programmers of Perl or Python may find this book usefull since it occasionally points out the differences with Ruby on specific techniques. I liked chapter 10 for discussing a few practical things such as dealing with XML or documenting with Rdoc. Chapter 11 however could have better been used to write about more Ruby stuff, not about a (rightly so) popular application that was written in it. People who want to know about Rails want and surely will read a book about Rails instead.
My conclusion is that this book delivers on it's promise. While this book is not an instant classic, the writing and examples in this book are mostly of good quality. If you are a beginning or experienced programmer looking for a taste of Ruby, you'll like this book. If however you are more of a practical person who has already read about basic programming things, you'll probably want to read another book instead.
Considering the price tag and the amount of pages, you'll might just want to buy this when you find yourself in a bookstore on a rainy day and happen to be a little bored but don't want to commit to something. Don't be surprised though if you find yourself getting hooked on Ruby thing after reading this book :-)
