Reviews for Learning Ruby

The average rating for Learning Ruby based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-11-08 00:00:00 Debra Brunk At about 230 pages, Learning Ruby is a quick read, but while I appreciate brevity, this introduction to the Ruby language lacks depth and isn't likely to answer many of the questions that a newcomer to the language might have. The book probably is good enough for a programmer who doesn't really want to learn the ins and outs of the language but just needs to know enough to start hacking on a Rails project. The core language features are covered passably well, but this could have been improved by expanding the discussion of Ruby's more interesting traits, such as the weird, sigil-filled syntax or the heavy use of blocks and closures. The section on exception handling is a mere two pages and doesn't even show how to define custom exceptions. More coverage of the standard library would have been helpful, too; I would have liked to have seen some overviews of the net/http, net/smtp, socket, and logger modules myself. Two XML modules are discussed, and in both cases the book shows how to assemble an XML document from scratch but not how to parse an existing XML document -- that's an astonishing omission. There is no real discussion of Unicode here, something that any programmer working in the 21st century needs to know. The chapter on Rails shows you how to start a new Rails project but stops short before anything interesting happens with the project. It does, however, list the URLs of several Rails screencasts and tutorials on the web, all of which are free, unlike this book.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-01-15 00:00:00 Marco Deyasi Beinga a Ruby beginner myself, I cannot judge the accuracy of the topics in the book, but my impression was very good. It won't make you a Ruby developer at once, but it will prepare you for everything that you're going to meet later on. It's pleasant to read, with just a little of humor but not so much as to feel treated like an idiot. The topics are clearly and logically organized. Unfortunately it is getting obsolete now: 7 years in IT are a huge time. So I won't reccomend to anyone unless a newer edition comes out.