Eloquent Ruby (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)
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Joined: Feb 15, 2002
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Author/s : Russ Olsen
Publisher : Addison-Wesley Professional
Category : Other Review by : Katrina Owen
Rating : 9 horseshoes
Eloquent Ruby is about readability. It is about shaping your code and expressing your intent. It is about expressing yourself fluently in ruby, not just using ruby syntax to force the computer to do your will. It is subtle, beautiful, and -yes- eloquent. The book is full of code examples that clearly illustrate the text. The chapters are short, crisp, and easy to digest. The tone is informal without falling into the trap of sounding like it's trying to be funny.
The book is deeply practical while still managing to be philosophical. It is neither a reference, nor a tutorial.
While I suspect that even experienced ruby programmers would take much pleasure in reading it, I think that those who can benefit the most from it are neither the beginners nor the experts, but rather those who can get stuff done competently in ruby, but might need a nudge or some inspiration to polish their skills and improve their eloquence. Eloquent Ruby would be particularly useful to folks new to the language but with a background in programming. If this is you, this book will help you get comfortable with the idioms of the language.
I recommend it heartily, and after reading it I went straight to Amazon and bought the author's other book, Design Patterns in Ruby.
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Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for writing this review on behalf of CodeRanch.
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