Eloquent Ruby (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)

After programming for years in static typed languages, I needed to learn Ruby for use at my professional work place. I started with "Learning Ruby The Hard Way" per recommendation from a fellow co-worker - it served as decent introduction. Then I switched to Eloquent Ruby even though I was recommended a different book since the reviews for this book were extremely positive. I was not disappointed. In addition to teaching the language, this book covers the ruby way of doing things and the reasoning behind why it's done that way. Such a treatment of the subject is a welcome change for me. Now I can understand the Ruby based conversations among my co-workers much better with this background. This is an extremely well written book with a lot of examples and it has been a pleasure to read. The author's writing style is very engaging - I'm impressed so much that I'll be checking out other books from the same author (notably Ruby Design Patterns). The chapter on regular expressions is excellent and I haven't seen a clearer explanation of it in other books I have referred to in the past. The "Staying Out of Trouble" section at the end of every chapter is helpful even though some of it will be obvious for the reader. "In the Wild" section that illustrates usage in real world code/frameworks of the concepts learned in a chapter is also useful as it helps to reinforce the learning process. This is not a book to read once and then leave on the shelf - I envision myself coming back to this book on an ongoing basis as I continue to develop Ruby applications. Highly recommended.

I enjoyed reading this book, and found it to be a useful adjunct to other learning materials. The technical content is very clearly presented, with just the right amount of detail to get the point across, and not much more. The author's tone is somewhat light-hearted, without being cloyingly jocular. Where the book differs from most tutorials is that it focuses on teaching Ruby that is not just "correct", but also idiomatic. I now understand better how, for example, Rails is able to work its various "magic" using various Ruby idioms. That said, I'm not entirely comfortable with the enthusiasm with which the author embraces some of Ruby's "magical" capabilities. I wonder how easy it might be to get carried away with some of these idioms and end up writing a bunch of difficult-to-understand, difficult-to-maintain code. However, insofar as this sort of jazz is part of idiomatic Ruby, I suppose the author is fulfilling his mandate by promoting it; so I hesitate to deduct a star just on account of my own scruples here. On the whole, I recommend this book - especially if you are coming from a more traditional object-oriented language (C++, Java) - and have yet to appreciate just how flexible (sometimes worryingly so) Ruby really is.

Overall, Russ Olsen's Eloquent Ruby is a good book. I feel that the book would be fantastic for anyone coming to Ruby with an in-depth knowledge of another programming language.My main reason for giving it four stars instead of five is that this edition is a bit dated (it focuses on Ruby 1.9) and the content while broad in scope is not as in depth as I'd hoped for. Also, it should be noted that Eloquent Ruby is written more like a reference book than a "how-to" or textbook (ie - while Russ Olsen does offer real world examples at the end of chapters, this book is not written with the express purpose of teaching you how to code using the Ruby programming language, or giving you multiple or one large scale "project" to work through with the authors guidance).

This book is impressively well-written. I've been working in Ruby for about a year and a half now and this gave me a friendly introduction into (and a way to unmuddy) topics that have been most elusive to my toolkit:1. Singleton classes2. Monkey patching3. Domain Specific Languages4. Blocks5. Metaprogramming (What it is and how easy it is to implement it.)For the sake of brevity, I will leave this list to what I consider to be the most valuable. At the end of this book I feel like all these topics are not mystical at all. This is a book I feel I will reference in the future although it is certainly not written as a reference guide.The author makes the read very conversational and easy to flow from one chapter to the next. It was hard to put down. Pretty impressive for a 400 page technical book.Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone that has intermediate experience in Ruby (or similar) and wants to take their skills and knowledge to the next level.

i'm a web and middle-tier developer with a strong background in c# and java and have been teaching myself ruby for about a year now (in the hopes of soon building rails apps.) I started w/ (extremely utilitarian, but extremely dry) "the ruby programming laguage" (flanagan, matsumoto) and that was a good way to get familiar with syntax and basic structure (and is a great tool to have on the shelf), but i often found myself scratching my head while sifting through code on github (which is a quick way to get really really confused if you're new to ruby) ...this book elucidates A LOT of the basic ruby-isms that i've encountered in the wild and really helped me build some foundation. a basic, but useful, intro to blocks, metaprogramming, and many other ruby-isms. a must-have for those learning, and/or looking to solidify their ruby.