Ruby Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly))

By Leonard Richardson and Lucas Carlson

Book Overview

Do you want to push Ruby to its limits? The Ruby Cookbook is the most comprehensive problem-solving guide to today's hottest programming language. It gives you hundreds of solutions to real-world problems, with clear explanations and thousands of lines of code you can use in your own projects.

From data structures and algorithms, to integration with cutting-edge technologies, the Ruby Cookbook has something for every programmer. Beginners and advanced Rubyists alike will learn how to program with:

Strings and numbers Arrays and hashes Classes, modules, and namespaces Reflection and metaprogramming XML and HTML processing Ruby on Rails (including Ajax integration) Databases Graphics Internet services like email, SSH, and BitTorrent Web services Multitasking Graphical and terminal interfaces

If you need to write a web application, this book shows you how to get started with Rails. If you're a system administrator who needs to rename thousands of files, you'll see how to use Ruby for this and other everyday tasks. You'll learn how to read and write Excel spreadsheets, classify text with Bayesian filters, and create PDF files. We've even included a few silly tricks that were too cool to leave out, like how to blink the lights on your keyboard.

The Ruby Cookbook is the most useful book yet written about Ruby. When you need to solve a problem, don't reinvent the wheel: look it up in the Cookbook.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596523696
• ISBN13: 9780596523695
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 906 Pages
• Weight: 2.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.2" x 1.7" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

Great collection of Ruby recipes and techniques

This cookbook is aimed at people who know at least a little bit of Ruby, or who know a fair amount about programming in general. This book isn't a Ruby tutorial, but if you're already familiar with a few other programming languages, you should be able to pick up Ruby by going through the first 10 chapters of this book. This book contains recipes suitable for all skill levels. It focuses mainly on generic programming techniques,...

Ruby Cookbook Review

I've looked at a couple programming "cookbooks" over the few years I've been programming, and none have ever really captured my attention. Most of them I found were lacking in useful recipes for novice programmers, or the recipes used an outdated code style or covered specific areas of a programming language. And with others, I just found it difficult to find useful tips or tricks. The Ruby Cookbook however, provides fresh,...

This Book is a Gem!

Sometimes, the difference between getting a project off the ground and watching it linger on the launchpad is finding an example of how to do something in code. Perhaps you're working on a project and you'd like to send an email using Ruby. Maybe you'd like to know how to read and write zip files or create thumbnail images from full size graphics files. Sometimes cruising through the API documentation just doesn't quite give...

A definite keeper

Some O'Reilly books are horrible, and some are great--this happens to be one of the better ones. It's full of concise examples of how to use Ruby's standard libraries and most popular extensions that more than make up for their frequently terrible and always unnavigable RubyDoc generated documentation. An excellent next step for those who've read through "Programming Ruby" and are wondering how to put the language's better...

Great to have this book to support Ruby

One of the greatest challenges to Ruby development was the lack of coherent resource base that development teams can refer to. There are great resources online but these have been mostly snippets of information located in various places. Ruby Cookbook follows the O'Reilly 'cookbook tradition and has good reference touch points to developers. This book help launch a Ruby project worked on by multiple teams in separate locations...