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David Black's book _Ruby for Rails

finetan

6/5/2007 5:07:00 PM

Hi all

Anyone of you have read the book, David Black's book _Ruby for Rails?

I 'd like to know what you think about the book from a professional
perspective.

Your insight some might find it useful.

-Jimmy

--
http://www.b...
16 Answers

pat eyler

6/5/2007 5:18:00 PM

0

On 6/5/07, finetan@hotmail.com <finetan@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all
>
> Anyone of you have read the book, David Black's book _Ruby for Rails?

I've read it, recommended it, and lent out my copy on a few occasions.
It's great.


>
> I 'd like to know what you think about the book from a professional
> perspective.
>

While not entirely about the book, I did interview David about it a while
ago:

http://on-ruby.bl.../2006/09/author-interview-david-...




> Your insight some might find it useful.
>
> -Jimmy
>
> --
> http://www.b...
>
>
>


--
thanks,
-pate
-------------------------
Duty makes us do things, Love make us do things well.
http://on-ruby.bl... http://on-erlang.bl...
http://on-soccer.bl...

Peter Szinek

6/5/2007 6:02:00 PM

0

pat eyler wrote:
> On 6/5/07, finetan@hotmail.com <finetan@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi all
>>
>> Anyone of you have read the book, David Black's book _Ruby for Rails?
>
> I've read it, recommended it, and lent out my copy on a few occasions.
> It's great.

+1

>> I 'd like to know what you think about the book from a professional
>> perspective.

I made a quick writeup a few months ago:

http://www.rubyra.../the-sadly-neglected-picka...

Cheers,
Peter
__
http://www.rubyra... :: Ruby and Web2.0 blog
http://s... :: Ruby web scraping framework
http://rubykitch... :: The indexed archive of all things Ruby.

Emilio Tagua

6/5/2007 6:32:00 PM

0

On 6/5/07, finetan@hotmail.com <finetan@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all
>
> Anyone of you have read the book, David Black's book _Ruby for Rails?
>
> I 'd like to know what you think about the book from a professional
> perspective.
>
> Your insight some might find it useful.
>

I think it's a great book, i would highly recommend it *after* reading
and understanding "Agile Development with Ruby on Rails".

It gives you an idea of what Rails does at the Ruby level. I wouldn't
recommend it as first book as i said before, maybe as a third
("Agile..." and a good Ruby book first). It has some great practices
and you will be a better Ruby programmer while doing apps in RoR.

Cheers

Daniel Waite

6/6/2007 1:25:00 AM

0

unknown wrote:
> I 'd like to know what you think about the book from a professional
> perspective.
>
> Your insight some might find it useful.

I've read through the book, and, like those above, loved it.

What I got most from it was its *incredibly thorough* explanation of the
concept of 'self' in Ruby. Moments after finishing the chapter on self I
ran to _why's creature code and, line by line, explained exactly what it
was doing. I was so proud of myself. :)

One of the above reviewers cited the book as a Pickaxe killer, and I
would tend to agree. While I, too, start with the Pickaxe, I could never
get passed the first hundred pages or so. I primarily used it as a
reference. R4R though was a smooth read through and through. Mr. Black's
knowledge of how Ruby works is top-notch, and an awesome, awesome gift
for anyone serious about developing in Ruby.

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-....

James Gray

6/6/2007 1:29:00 AM

0

On Jun 5, 2007, at 8:24 PM, Daniel Waite wrote:

> unknown wrote:
>> I 'd like to know what you think about the book from a professional
>> perspective.
>>
>> Your insight some might find it useful.
>
> I've read through the book, and, like those above, loved it.
>
> What I got most from it was its *incredibly thorough* explanation
> of the concept of 'self' in Ruby.

That's a good point. I learned things from that explanation myself.

It is a very good book, though it will never kill the Pickaxe for me.

James Edward Gray II

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

6/6/2007 2:19:00 AM

0

Emilio Tagua wrote:
> On 6/5/07, finetan@hotmail.com <finetan@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi all
>>
>> Anyone of you have read the book, David Black's book _Ruby for Rails?
>>
>> I 'd like to know what you think about the book from a professional
>> perspective.
>>
>> Your insight some might find it useful.
>>
>
> I think it's a great book, i would highly recommend it *after* reading
> and understanding "Agile Development with Ruby on Rails".
>
> It gives you an idea of what Rails does at the Ruby level. I wouldn't
> recommend it as first book as i said before, maybe as a third
> ("Agile..." and a good Ruby book first). It has some great practices
> and you will be a better Ruby programmer while doing apps in RoR.
>
> Cheers
>
>
Well ... I think you *can* learn both Ruby and Rails from _Ruby for
Rails_. Now "Agile" and "Pickaxe" are more or less mandatory as
*referenced* once you're developing Ruby or Rails code for a living. But
if you know nothing about either, I'd recommend starting with _Ruby for
Rails_.

Robert Klemme

6/6/2007 8:58:00 AM

0

On 06.06.2007 03:24, Daniel Waite wrote:
> What I got most from it was its *incredibly thorough* explanation of the
> concept of 'self' in Ruby. Moments after finishing the chapter on self I
> ran to _why's creature code and, line by line, explained exactly what it
> was doing. I was so proud of myself. :)

You make it sound as if there was something complex about "self". Makes
me wonder whether I am missing something about "self". As far as I can
see "self" is an ordinary variable with these additional properties:

- it is automatically set to the current receiver and it cannot be
altered by Ruby code

- it is implicitly used for method invocations without an explicit
receiver and for instance variable access

Did I miss anything?

Kind regards

robert

dblack

6/6/2007 10:58:00 AM

0

James Gray

6/6/2007 12:11:00 PM

0

On Jun 6, 2007, at 5:57 AM, dblack@wobblini.net wrote:

> Almost anything in the language can probably
> be reduced to a couple of defining phrases, but just saying (for
> example) that a class method is a singleton method of a class object
> doesn't actually make everyone understand or feel confident about
> applying the concepts involved.

And David's description of the singleton class is another terrific
feature of the book.

James Edward Gray II

Robert Klemme

6/6/2007 12:14:00 PM

0

On 06.06.2007 12:57, dblack@wobblini.net wrote:
> Hi --
>
> On Wed, 6 Jun 2007, Robert Klemme wrote:
>
>> On 06.06.2007 03:24, Daniel Waite wrote:
>>> What I got most from it was its *incredibly thorough* explanation of
>>> the concept of 'self' in Ruby. Moments after finishing the chapter on
>>> self I ran to _why's creature code and, line by line, explained
>>> exactly what it was doing. I was so proud of myself. :)
>>
>> You make it sound as if there was something complex about "self".
>> Makes me wonder whether I am missing something about "self". As far
>> as I can see "self" is an ordinary variable with these additional
>> properties:
>>
>> - it is automatically set to the current receiver and it cannot be
>> altered by Ruby code
>>
>> - it is implicitly used for method invocations without an explicit
>> receiver and for instance variable access
>>
>> Did I miss anything?
>
> Only the fact that in practice, grasping self is a stumbling-block for
> a lot of people. In addition to just getting the concept of a
> "default object", which is not always easy, there's the question of
> where and when self changes, which can be confusing because it
> sometimes overlaps with local scope but not always.

This reminds me of the headaches I had when confronted with OOP the
first time. That's quite a few years ago now and OOP has become my
second nature (or so) - that's probably the reason why I did not find
anything strange about "self". But true, for somebody relatively new to
OOP this might be considerably harder. I had forgotten that. But it's
good to be reminded of this once in a while.

> So I wanted to explain (and document and demonstrate) both self and
> scope pretty thoroughly. Almost anything in the language can probably
> be reduced to a couple of defining phrases, but just saying (for
> example) that a class method is a singleton method of a class object
> doesn't actually make everyone understand or feel confident about
> applying the concepts involved. People really do learn in different
> ways :-)

Sure. I didn't want to question the explanation (haven't even read the
book as I am not doing any Rails), I was just curious whether I missed
something. Thank you for your explanation!

Kind regards

robert