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Book: The Ruby Programming Language

28.Jun.2009

The Ruby Programming Language by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto

Taking advantage of the recent free time, I was able to finish reading the other book I’ve bought at Sapo Codebits (the first was The Myths Of Innovation). The Ruby Programming Language is like one of those reference books, taking you through an overview of all the language features. I had already a good knowledge of the essential aspects of Ruby, but I wanted to have a full view of all it can really do.

The book was written by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto and has what you should expect, especially when the creator of a language is one of the authors (Matz, as he is commonly known). It covers methodically each feature, even some relatively unknown like fibers and some hooks. It’s not as boring as it may sound, since the concepts are well spread across all the book, and ruby code is of fairly light reading.

I enjoyed most the functional and metaprogramming chapters. They give a good insight on all the coding possibilities. A special note to the always great why comics that illustrate each chapter cover.

It’s a good book for anyone trying to gain a big knowledge of the programming language. Not one to be read from cover to cover, but to be picked up occasional and dive in a particular topic.