[Practical Ruby Gems]

[Prabhakar Chaganti]

Hi David,

Could you point me to a list of gems covered by the book? Also how did you reduce your list to the 30 gems for the book? Rubyforge has a ton of them and several are very popular.

thanks

[David Berube]

Hi,

Sure; here's the table of contents:

http://www.apress.com/ApressCorporate/supplement/1/10261/1590598113-4231.pdf

To quote Tim Hunter quoting me in his Slashdot review:

"As far as deciding which gems, ...I tried to look at things that had
practical applications - as well as things where I could give it an
interesting angle. Above all, I tried to cover different material in a
different way - I wanted to get people to think "wow, that's great." Of
course, not everything was completely off the beaten path - Rails, for
example, was covered, and that' easily the most popular gem, and RMagick
isn't exactly unpopular either, but I tried to show gems which could
make very difficult, less covered problems - like programatically using
zip files as a container, writing PDFs, or automating SSH tasks - into
easy problems...The biggest thing for me is that I wanted to make people
say 'You can do that with Ruby?'"

Take it easy,

David Berube