From: Tim Hunter Date: 2007-06-20T08:21:54+09:00 Subject: Re: Practical Ruby Gems review Phrogz wrote: > On Jun 18, 5:37 pm, Tim Hunter wrote: > >> After waiting in the Slashdot pending queue for over a month (!), my >> review of David Berube's _Practical_Ruby_Gems_ finally made it to the >> front page:http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/18/1623249. >> > > Congratulations. > > How did you feel about the choice of gems? Was it a good list? Was it > missing some really important gems? Was there a theme to the choices? > (Most veteran? Most interesting? Randomly chosen?) > Yes, I thought the choice was good. The list includes rake, mongrel, pdf-writer, Camping, hpricot, and markaby. You've gotta figure that any gem in that company is pretty good. Not every gem is "big," like Rails. Some are small, like linguistics. You can get the full table of contents from the Apress web site: http://www.apress.com/book/supplementDownload.html?bID=10261&sID=4231. David and I corresponded by email and he said I could quote him, so here's what he told me about how he made his choices: "As far as deciding which gems, ...I tried to look at things that had practical applications - as well as things where I could give it an interesting angle. Above all, I tried to cover different material in a different way - I wanted to get people to think "wow, that's great." Of course, not everything was completely off the beaten path - Rails, for example, was covered, and that' easily the most popular gem, and RMagick isn't exactly unpopular either, but I tried to show gems which could make very difficult, less covered problems - like programatically using zip files as a container, writing PDFs, or automating SSH tasks - into easy problems...The biggest thing for me is that I wanted to make people say 'You can do that with Ruby?'" -- RMagick OS X Installer [http://rubyforge.org/projects/rmagick/] RMagick Hints & Tips [http://rubyforge.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=1618] RMagick Installation FAQ [http://rmagick.rubyforge.org/install-faq.html]