It's been 12 years since Yukihiro Matsumoto released Ruby's first version. Now that Ruby has achieved mass popularity, more and more people are getting into this new, perhaps odd, programming language. Among other functionalities, Ruby is very suitable for developing lightning fast scripts and learning how to write these is this book's main purpose.
The book is written around four interesting projects that teach you from the basics of Ruby to some useful aspects of this language. Those are an uninstaller checker, a version control system, a web page information retriever and a system monitor for watching long-running programs and then forward information trough email or instant messaging.
Even though the graphics in the book's back says it is for people between beginner and expert level users, I find it specially good for beginners. I'd risk saying that it is even suitable for absolute beginners due to the fact that Brian Marick explains how to set up the language, use a system shell as well as what object oriented programming is, etc...
He does all this without appealing to other languages. This fact, although it is great for beginners, can sometimes annoy experienced developers a bit but it's nothing one cannot deal with.
Brian Marick lead us through the book using a simple and direct speech sometimes with a slight sense of humor to chill things out. He doesn't only teaches how to use the language but also encourage people using it referring to eventual “bugs” and other things that may appear to be odd for beginners.
Another good characteristics are the “Ruby Facts” chapters, it's like an intermission that briefly introduces some concepts as in chapter 10 - “Ruby Facts: Regular Expressions”.
The book intends that the reader goes programming along with it as it is a practical book. No deep and extensive concepts are taught here, there's not even an introduction reminding of Ruby's history. Therefore this is a straight practice oriented hands-on book with it's main target being testers that might want to automate some of their work.
Concluding, despite the fact that the book's name ends with “for Teams, Testers and You”, all the book seems to be written thinking about testers. I recommend the book specially for beginners who want to learn Ruby as their first programming language and for people who don't know Ruby and want to learn quickly how to write Ruby scripts. Therefore I give this book an overall classification of 4/5.
Review by
Joaquim Rocha (NEEI)
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