FAGBOK: "Programming Ruby" av Dave Thomas

Denne likte jeg godt! Og Ruby virker skikkelig spennende. En god blanding av Perl og Java.

Hva jeg liker med Ruby etter å ha lest boken:

• Alt er objekter. Slipper Javas merkelig blanding av objekter og grunntyper.
• Kodeblokker som parametere til metoder. Nydelige løkkekonstruksjoner!
  
• Mye av det positive i Perl er med.

Hva jeg ikke liker (stadig basert på boken og ikke praktisk koding):

• Noen ganger virker syntaksen merkelig og uskjønn.
• Mye av det negative i Perl er med. Spesielt de magiske variablene burde man sluppet.
• Jeg liker stadig ikke dynamisk typing! Vil nødig komme tilbake til slik det var i Fortran hvor mystiske feil dukket opp pga feilstavede variablenavn. Dynamisk typing er sikkert fint for kjappe småprogrammer, men jeg liker store prosjekter!

Boken er godt skrevet og trivelig å lese. Den er naturligvis for lang slik som de fleste amerikanske databøker er, men man trenger jo ikke lese alt...

Kan kjøpes på Amazon.

Amazon sier:
Ruby is an increasingly popular, fully object-oriented dynamic programming language, hailed by many practitioners as the finest and most useful language available today. When Ruby first burst onto the scene in the Western world, the Pragmatic Programmers were there with the definitive reference manual, Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide. Now in its Second Edition, author Dave Thomas has expanded the famous Pickaxe book with over 200 pages of new content, covering all the new and improved language features of Ruby 1.8 and standard library modules. The Pickaxe contains four major sections:

• An acclaimed tutorial on using Ruby.
• The definitive reference to the language.
• Complete documentation on all built-in classes, modules, and methods
• Complete descriptions of all 98 standard libraries.

If you enjoyed the First Edition, you'll appreciate the new and expanded content, including: enhanced coverage of installation, packaging, documenting Ruby source code, threading and synchronization, and enhancing Ruby's capabilities using C-language extensions. Programming for the world-wide web is easy in Ruby, with new chapters on XML/RPC, SOAP, distributed Ruby, templating systems and other web services. There's even a new chapter on unit testing. This is the definitive reference manual for Ruby, including a description of all the standard library modules, a complete reference to all built-in classes and modules (including more than 250 significant changes since the First Edition). Coverage of other features has grown tremendously, including details on how to harness the sophisticated capabilities of irb, so you can dynamically examine and experiment with your running code. "Ruby is a wonderfully powerful and useful language, and whenever I'm working with it this book is at my side" --Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks

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