Practical Ruby Projects: Ideas for the Eclectic Programmer

By Topher Cyll and Christopher Cyll

Book Overview

Revitalized by Ruby on Rails, the Ruby language continues to grow in popularity. Books like this are necessary to fill the demand. Here is a classic of its kind; required reading for Ruby programmers who have already mastered the basics and want to learn higher level techniques. Practical Ruby Projects presents nine diverse projects that will teach new and innovative techniques in a learn-by-example fashion. These projects include a turn-based adventure game and a generative music creator. While there are many other Ruby titles, none of them take this unique project-based approach to teaching. It's an original approach to Ruby, which will inspire existing Ruby users, rather than just rehashing the basics.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 159059911X
• ISBN13: 9781590599112
• Release Date: December 2007
• Publisher: Apress
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 7.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Easy Read

This is one of the rare technical books, that's actually quite fun to read. Additionally, all except the last two chapters can be read out of turn. I think this is an excellent book. Take the time and get excited by taking a fresh look at ruby.

Feet first and freewheeling

The hands-on style of this book is contagious; you'll find yourself really wanting to jump in and try out the code samples. The source is available on Topher's site, but the simplicity and sense of immediacy are such that you may want to just start typing it in yourself. In a few minutes, you're making music or creating a game.

A great seed for projects!

This is a great ruby book for those new to the language, or for those who already know a good deal of ruby but wouldn't mind learning how to do some cool quirky things with ruby, like programmatically compose and play midi. This book will not walk you through how to use ruby if you are new to the language -- but their are plenty of other books (and online references) that can do the real introductory teaching. Working through...

Finally a book for experienced Ruby developers

The past few years have seen the English-language Ruby book market explode. Before the phenomenal success of Rails it was perfectly possible to own every available title (and not use much storage space), but now that would be quite a challenge and lead to considerable redundancy. Having worked my way through quite a few Rails books of late, reading Practical Ruby Projects--a Ruby book that doesn't even mention web frameworks--was...

Best Ruby Book Since "The Ruby Way"

Most Ruby books milk newbies jumping on the bandwagon for cash. This is a book for experienced Ruby programmers who want to be awesome Ruby programmers. The book of the book is all about parsing and shows you how to implement Lisp in Ruby; the first project is a compact, simple, powerful system for creating music in real time in Ruby. I'm using it to drive Propellerhead Reason from the command line and I'm on page 25. This...