The Ruby Way

The so-called ‘Pickaxe Book’ (Dave Thomas’s Programming Ruby) isn’t the only Jumbo-sized tome on the Ruby programming language. At over 800 pages, Hal Fulton’s The Ruby Way could barely be said to be a lightweight.

I must admit that, over the years, I have become increasingly suspicious of doorstopper programming books. Many of them contain more stuffing than a Christmas turkey. I am happy to say that this is not the case with The Ruby Way. In spite of its size, it is reasonably terse. If you are new to Ruby, this may sound like a contradiction. After all, how can such a fat book be said to be terse when it’s devoted to a language which is as small and simple as Ruby?

Small? Simple? What, Ruby…?

At first sight, Ruby may indeed seem simple, but its apparent simplicity is deceptive. True, you can write the traditional “Hello world” in a single line of code. And, yes, you could even write a file backup program in a dozen or so lines. But scratch beneath the surface, and you’ll find that Ruby is more complex than it looks.

To master Ruby programming you’ll need to get to grips with numerous classes and methods, modules and ‘mixins’ (that is, modules which supply additional methods to a class through ‘inclusion’); not to mention regular expressions, looping constructs, data structures such as hashes and arrays, threads, blocks, dynamic evaluation, testing, debugging tools and much more besides. Half Fulton covers all those features, explaining them clearly and illustrating them with lots of small code snippets.

In the introductory section, the author states that, due to its relative lack of ‘tutorial’ material, “You probably won’t learn Ruby from this book.” He describes it more as a “sort of ‘inverted reference’. Rather than looking up the name of a method or a class, you will look things up by function or purpose.” Personally, I think he greatly underestimates the tutorial value of The Ruby Way. As long as you are reasonably adept at programming in some other language, you should have no difficulty in picking up Ruby using this book as your sole reference. In fact, I would personally prefer to learn from a book such as this which cuts out the waffle and gets down to the nitty-gritty at an early stage. Once you’ve read through a brief introductory section, you are then free to browse for more specific information, rather than being forced to wade through successive chapters in order (something I really dislike in tutorials).

The one thing Hal Fulton doesn’t cover in any depth is Ruby On Rails. This may seem surprising, given the fact that the Rails framework has, over the last year or so, been responsible for generating a huge amount of interest in Ruby itself. Rails is given just five pages. Some less high profile web frameworks, such as Nitro and IOWA are given as much or more coverage.

That’s not really a criticism, though. If you are sincerely interested in Rails development, you should get a book such as Agile Web Development With Rails or Ruby For Rails, each of which goes into that subject in some depth.

If you are looking for a comprehensive guide to Ruby itself, on the other hand, Hal Fulton’s book will probably one of the first two on your list of ‘must haves’. Which only leaves the question – which one should come top? The Ruby Way or The Pickaxe Book?

I know that many Ruby programmers consider the Pickaxe Book to be the cream of the crop. Personally, though, if I were to choose just one Ruby book, I’d go for The Ruby Way. To me, it seems better structured and more lucid. Though it probably goes without saying that any serious Ruby programmer will probably want to buy both books…