From: 7stud -- Date: 2011-03-16T11:46:41+09:00 Subject: Re: 2011: Which Ruby books have you read? And which would you recommend? 1)For Beginners: a)The Pickaxe (i.e. Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas, et al, the latest edition). You need the docs in the back of the book for a reference--I think this book is required for that reason alone. b)Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional(latest edition) -- a good, basic book with some nice, lengthier examples and a good section on ruby and the web(which is really the defacto docs on the subject, as far as I can tell). 2)Intermediate: a) The Well Grounded Rubyist (by David Black who also posts great advice here). I thought it was a very good book, and I need to reread it. b) MetaProgramming Ruby -- pretty easy to understand, so don't let the word 'metaprogramming' throw you off. The setting is your new ruby programming job at a company where you and your co-worker Bill rewrite legacy code. Bill stops and gives you a complete tutorial about the tricks he plans to employ to rewrite portions of the code. Then Bill presents examples of the same tricks employed in various ruby libraries. I thought the back and forth dialogue between Bill and the newbie(you) was amusing. The word "metaprogramming" as used here really means "dynamic" programming, which I would define as programming in situations when you have a variable name, method name, or class name as a string and you want to do something to the actual variable, method, or class. The book contains a good explanation of the class structure in ruby, and how to keep track of what 'self' refers to. 3) Advanced: a) Design Patterns in Ruby -- I've only read the beginning of this book, and I really liked it. I have a design patterns book for Java, and though patterns were originally developed for statically typed languages like Java, the patterns are so complex that they are hard to understand. And the complexity has largely to do with creating classes or interfaces that allow you to produce a certain type. One of the easier patterns, the Decorator pattern, can easily be comprehended in a dynamically typed language like python and ruby--when you eliminate all the type-ing. I plan on buying this book next, and I look forward to finally understanding some of the GOF patterns with out all the type complexity mucking things up. -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.